Mike Davis

John is the Dardanian scout who is just finishing up his three-year stint scouting planet Earth. But he has a problem. He has a wife, Diane, and a nine-month-old daughter, Mary, that he must leave behind. Their existence is a major violation of the Scout Code that John lives by, not to mention a confusing set of circumstances that he must deal with internally.The soul of science fiction resides in the world of social commentary, and the report John gives to the Dardanian High Counsel after he has returned to the pod about the possibilities and limitations of Earth fulfills that promise. However, while John gives his report, Diane, back on Earth, is left to pick up the pieces of her own life as a single mother who now has to deal with Mary as she has never dealt with her before. Mary, half alien, half earthling, is chock-full of surprises, and as Diane unlocks a series of clues that lead her to understand who John really was and now who Mary really is, her horror about her daughter's secret presents her with consequential life choices.

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working blue collar jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist without peer.Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis's book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth and exploring Davis's thinking on history, labor, capitalism, and revolution - themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. This will be his first book on Marxism itself.In a time of ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites, explores the question of revolutionary agency-what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order?-and the situation of the world's working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in classical socialist thought, such as clarifying "proletarian agency", before turning to the urgent questions of our time: global warming, the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt, and the city's demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the end of history?

For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography. In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make—that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city. Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.

For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography. In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make—that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city. Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardA CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. Mike Davis chronicles the Dickensian underworld of day labor in New York, tracks the development of new ecologies and levels of development along the border, and examines the shifting realities of life and work for Latinos in US cities. The cosmopolitan result of the Latinization of America's cities "is a rich, constantly evolving" culture that has the potential, argues Davis, to become a radical new American counterculture.

En Nadie es ilegal, los eruditos-activistas Mike Davis y Justin Akers exponen el racismo de los vigilantes anti-inmigraciones y dan un rostro humano a los inmigrantes que arriesgan sus vidas cada d a para cruzar la frontera y trabajar en los Estados Unidos. Rebatiendo el coro creciente de voces anti-inmigrantes, Nadie es ilegal demuestra las ra ces profundas de los inmigrantes en la historia de los EE. UU. y documenta el movimiento empezando en 2006 por los derechos civiles que ha organizado manifestaciones por todo el pa s para exigir justicia y dignidad para los inmigrantes. Ahora con una nueva introducci n haciendo frente a la ola m s reciente de reacci n violenta anti-inmigrante, y figurando fotos conmovedores y evocadoras del fot grafo galardonado Juli n Cardona, Nadie es ilegal es una lectura obligada para cualquiera persona que busca aumentar su comprensi n de los movimientos de justicia para los inmigrantes.

Counterpointing Los Angeles's central role in America's fantasy life - the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 - with its wanton denial of its own real history, Mike Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease in an era of climate change and social change. With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.With a new 2021 afterword taking stock of LA's 21st century.

In his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis explains how the problems he warned of remain, and he sets the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of previous disastrous outbreaks, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago. In language both accessible and authoritative, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today's viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture.Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture.Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

Kevin Cousins is a young Koori boy from the Shoalhaven who finds himself in an alien world when his Gran takes ill and is hospitalised there. His life seems to be taking on some kind of structure when he and his sister join the Surf Club and earn their Bronze Medallions so that they can get a surfboard. Then their Gran dies and their mother suffers a total physical collapse. Things will get a lot worse before they get better. At least he and his baby sis are together until they took her away. Kevin will learn his life lessons at the knee of his Uncle Robert and hope that one day his family will be together as one. There's even a time when his mooring lines come loose and he finds himself dangerously adrift is seas of uncertainty after his closest mate is killed on his bike. Kevin will find purpose finally and take control of his life when he befriends the youngest child in the settlement at Wreck Bay and makes sure Little Stevie learns the same lessons he been so lovingly schooled in. Only then does his life take on meaning and the things he's missed so much are returned to him.

Surfboard shaper, Medford Haley answers a call for help from his mother to leave his home at Noosa Heads, Australia to help her deliver on a promise to an old friend with a restoration of an old Mohave granary in the Mojave Desert. He soon discovers that he not only faces a near impossible task but is also at war with an underground neo-nazi para-military super-cell who want to control the valley and water after his eighty-four year old mother shoots the predatory tattooed cue-ball in the leg for patting her on the butt. All appears lost until Smoke, the mysterious caretaker enlists Gray Wolf, the Mojave shaman who summons and the timeless people themselves to rid itself of this cancer stain on America. What grows out of this battlefield is a desert flower

Medford Haley is Sioux. He is a surfboard shaper whose clientele consists of surfers who travel beyond the fringes in search of new and different adventures. His latest stint beyond he home at Noosa Heads, Australia begins when he is awakened in the early morning hours by his neighbour, the daughter of a very close friend in great distress. It seems that she had inseminated herself with the semen from a frozen and mummified corpse of a Neolithic man discovered eighteen year prior and a rabid right wing bunch of religious nutters want to kill her and her son, who is Medford's clean-up and ding repair kid at his factory. Medford and the mother and son flee into the night heading for 'A place that time forgot and the Christians couldn't find.' Which turns out to be and island of cannibalistic head-hunters in the Tabu Group in Northern Papua New Guinea. Medford enlists his old surfing buddy and yachtsman Charlie Hefernan to facilitate an incredible disappearing act. Once again Medford is stuck between a rock and a harder place. Will this indeed be the ageing Medford's last stand against overwhelming odds when going back is the only way of going forward? Only time and a double dose of Sioux wisdom can tell.

“A fascinating portrait of activism deepened and sustained by Herculean labors of research and investigation.”—The Nation Historian Kevin Starr described Carey McWilliams as "the finest nonfiction writer on California—ever" and "the state's most astute political observer." But as Peter Richardson argues, McWilliams was also one of the nation's most versatile and productive public intellectuals of his time. Richardson's absorbing and elegant biography traces McWilliams's extraordinary life and career. Drawing from a wide range of sources, it explores his childhood on a Colorado cattle ranch, his early literary journalism in Los Angeles, his remarkable legal and political activism, his stint in state government, the explosion of first-rate books between 1939 and 1950, and his editorial leadership at The Nation. Along the way, it also documents McWilliams's influence on a wide range of key figures, including Cesar Chavez, Hunter S. Thompson, Mike Davis, screenwriter Robert Towne, playwright Luis Valdez, and historian Patricia Limerick.