![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The first of these volumes changed everything when it came out in late 1990, six months before the beating of Black motorist Rodney King by four white LAPD officers laid the hypocrisies of the city bare. For almost all of us who write and think about Los Angeles, he was not only a touchstone but also a lodestar, the most important and original thinker about the city since Carey McWilliams defected to New York in 1951.ĭavis would write 20 books, including “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World” and “Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class.” But to me, his legacy is built on what I’ve come to imagine as his Los Angeles trilogy: “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (Verso, 512 pp., $21.95 paper), “Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster” (Verso, 496 pp., $24.95 paper) and “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of Mike Davis, who died Tuesday at 76 from complications related to esophageal cancer. ![]()
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