Dead Cities and Other Tales by Mike Davis (review)

2 0 6 WAL 3 8 .2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 3 Dead Cities and Other Tales. By Mike Davis. N ew York: New Press, 2002. 432 pages, $27.95. Reviewed by Scott Hermanson D ana College, Blair, Nebraska Early on in Dead Cities, Mike Davis resurrects the apocalyptic vision ofWovoka , the messianic figure at the head of the Ghost Dance rebellion. Wovoka, Davis writes, rejected the illusory stability of a conquered West, a linear histori­ cal narrative that seemingly writ the end of history for Native Americans. Rather, the history that Wovoka—and by extension, Davis—depicted was “the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the ter­ rible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternate, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures” (31). In his books about Los Angeles, other urban cities, and the perpetual struggle of the lower economic classes, Davis has been perhaps the most dynamic chronicler of the despised his­ tory of the subaltern classes. Dead Cities revisits familiar ground for Davis. Ten of the eighteen chapters deal primarily with Los Angeles. Some, in fact, seem like outtakes from City of Quartz or Ecology of Fear, two of his earlier works focused exclusively on L.A. In the other chapters, Davis ventures furtherafield to Berkeley, Las Vegas, Utah, and Hawaii. This partial list suggests that, even away from L.A., Davis is still occu­ pied with the view of America as seen at its western terminus. In Los Angeles, Davis creates a lensforreinterpretingwesternhistorythrough a visible future consisting of exurban sprawl, Foucauldian surveillance, and a cat­ astrophic struggle to dominate nature. This latter facet increasingly underpins his theories of urban existence. Davis has embraced an epistemological understand­ ing of both the urban and natural environment shaped by a post-Newtonian, nonlinear chaos. He most frequentlydepicts this througha historydefined bycat­ astrophic events. In Ecology ofFear, it was Malibu firestorms, tornadoes, and maneating cougars. In Dead Cities, the catastrophes range from the Cold War ecocide ofthe West’s militarized deserts to the Los Angeles riots to the terrorist attacks on New York. The catastrophic incident, Davis argues, shatters the illusion of stabil­ ity and gradual change predicated upon a linear cause-and-effect analysis. Nature, Davis argues, cannot be reduced to the net effects of its direct, proportional parts. Davis resurveys the natural world in light of nonlinear science and translates this understanding to that most complex of human structures, the city. “We know more about rainforest ecology than urban ecology,” Davis writes, and we repeat­ edly analyze urbantroublesas linearproblems ofmechanical decomposition (363). Always the champion of the city, Davis cuts through inflammatory rhetoric and political promises of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations with damning depictions of the financial abandonment of urban areas in pursuit of suburban votes and money. Yet while Davis laudably critiques the exploitation of race, class, and nature, he continues to have a blind spot regarding gender. Dead BOOK REVIEWS 2 0 7 Cities lacks any significant attention paid to the differences ofwomen in the new economy. From a theorist of the urban condition so concerned with the multi­ plicities of oppression, the absence of any sustained treatment of gender leaves a large void in the structure. Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology. Ed. David L. Ulin. N ew York: Library of Am erica, 2002. 883 pages, $40.00. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis Professor Emeritus, University of Oklahom a Seventy-seven writers are represented in this collection. Their contribu­ tions range from an 1883 piece on Hispanic survivors by Helen Hunt Jackson, whose Ramona is “where the literary culture of Los Angeles begins,” to several pieces from the mid-1990s. They vary in formfrom New Journalism to poetry to solid reportage to noir fiction and in tone from the nostalgia ofJackson to Mike Davis’s attack on the “eutopic (literally no-place) logic” of developers’ subdivi­ sions, with many gradations between (769). Thus, Louis Adamic thinks Los Angeles “a bad place” (54); some natives such as Robert Irwin and immigrants such as David Hockney speak affectionately of the ethos and the landscape. Gavin Lambert states...