Dead Cities by Mike Davis, New Press, $26.95, ISBN 1565847652
The title of Mike Davis’s Dead Cities recalls the early Martin Amis novel Dead Babies. It’s a similarly shocking attention-grabber, and a similarly sly, oblique allusion to the true topic. This isn’t a book about the dusty remains of once-great centres of urban life – Babylon, Troy, Pergamon, Tikal and the like – but an angry trawl through the ills and traumas that threaten to kill our cities.
It is, unmistakably, a view from Los Angeles – city of angels, bumper to -bumper on the freeway, flames in the eucalyptus-scented night, earthquakes,…
