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Article: Urban Legends
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- March 9, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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DEAD CITIES
And Other Tales
By Mike Davis
New Press. 432 pp. $27.95
Because Mike Davis focuses in his new book on the urban nightmare
only, leaving out the mix of experience, Dead Cities is a more purely
artistic product than his rough-hewn, half-journalistic, half-
academic style tends to suggest. Davis is best known for City of
Quartz, his 1992 study of Los Angeles, which, because he had a single
subject, was taken largely as a reportorial work in the service of a
political point of view.
For Davis is a critic of capitalism, as he makes plain. There is
always in his work a strong feeling of advocacy, as if he were making
an argument, though he is not doing that exactly: He is just asking ...