'Courageously broad in its scope, City of Quartz changes intellectual gear - from history to sociology to urban theory - often with consummate ease, and fits its diverse threads together in a sort of 'history noir' as gripping as any Chandler. ' Listener. In this taut and compulsive exploration, Mike Davis recounts the story of Los Angeles with passion, wit and an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust and, often the dangerous. He tells a lurid tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States. As the Joshua trees are ripped from the desert by developers of walled communities protected by 'armed response' security, as yet more concrete is poured to defend Japanese real estate from desperate migrants without work or hope, as a stew of greed, megalonamia and corruption wreaks ever more havoc on his native city, Davis' elegiac tale points to a future in which the sublime and the dreadful are inextricable. That future does not belong to Southern California alone. Terrifyingly it belongs to us all.