Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics & Economy in the History of the U. S. Working Class

Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s prototype the car bomb has evolved into a “poor man

Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America)

Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment," David Thomson imagined

Planet of Slums

Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next 30 years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'peverse' urban boom in spite of

Dead Cities: And Other Tales

In his most provocative writing yet, the radical urban theorist Mike Davis explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America, the site of a perpetual battle waged within cities and against nature. Davis examines themes of urban life today - whit

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardIs the capital of Latin America a small island at the mouth of the Hudson River? Will California soon hold the balance of power in Mexican national politics? Will Latinos reinvigorate the US labor movement?These ar

No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border

No One Is Illegal debunks the leading ideas behind the often violent right-wing backlash against immigrants.Countering the chorus of anti-immigrant voices, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacón expose the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and put a huma

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

The hidden story of L.A. Mike Davis shows us where the city's money comes from and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the en