Ecology of Fear: Burning Our Illusitons Tonight

The secret political history of disasters in Los Angeles, including the earthquakes of Santa Monica, the burning of Koreatown, and the invention of "man-eating" mountain lions. Davis maintains that social injustice and the perception of natural disorder are closely related, and he attempts to show that the floods, fires, and earthquakes that the city has reaped were as avoidable and unnatural as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets. A "New York Times" Notable Book for 1998.

"...If Davis takes a darkling view of the California dream, there is nothing dim or dull about his book. His great strengths are a vigorous prose style...a provocative thesis...and a dizzying catalog of delicious, and sometimes frightening, facts." - Errol Fuller (New York Times, 8/31/98)

"Davis's cataclysmic history is clearly designed to disabuse anyone still willing to buy into the area's long-cultivated peaceful and sun-drenched mythology." - (New Yorker, 9/14/98)

"I'm not summoning Armageddon," affirms Davis, a social historian and urban theorist whose 1990 NBCC-nominated, dystopian history of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, City of Quartz, is now a cult classic. Maybe so, but the portrait of a city on the brink presented in this powerful, if sometimes scattershot, follow-up volume is sure to remind readers of the Book of Revelations. The book takes Davis in a new direction away from the politics of L.A. urban planning, toward geophysical threats to the city, ranging from earthquakes to fires, floods and killer bees. Davis's polemic will raise as ma - (Publishers Weekly, 6/22/98)

"One of Davis' strengths as a writer is an immense talent for presenting theoretical problems as practical matters, but without condescending to his readers or dumbing down the point." - (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 10/4/98)

"The despairing effect of "Ecology of Fear" is to insist that no story of our lives together can resist the perfect catastrophes Davis imagines for L.A. That would be L.A.'s ultimate disaster." - Gordon B. Evans (Salon, 9/21/98)

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