Author Michael Sayeau added to Laphams Quarterly book discussions
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A great last minute addition to our Book Discussions this weekend led by Laphams Quarterly - Verso author Michael Sayeau will be joining us to discuss City Of Quartz (picked by Battles). Michael is a professor at University College London, a book reviewer for the New Statesman, and the author of a book called Against the Event.
More info on those books here!
City Of Quartz - Mike Davis (Verso Books) - buy from amazon.co.uk
(picked by John)
No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In "City of Quartz", Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West-a city in which we may glimpse our own future, mirrored with terrifying clarity.