NY Times, Nov. 3, 2002

'Dead Cities': Jeremiah With a MacArthur Grant
By JOHN SUTHERLAND

DEAD CITIES
And Other Tales.
By Mike Davis.
Illustrated. 432 pp. New York: The New Press. $27.95.

How to classify Mike Davis? Is he the Cassandra of our age, prophesying disasters to which we, like the citizens of doomed Troy, willfully stop our ears? Or is he what Anthony Trollope called Thomas Carlyle, Mr. Pessimist Anticant, a neurotic gloom-and-doom monger?

As a social critic, Davis positions himself outside the whale, as Orwell instructed, and well to the left of ''Leviathan.'' The biographical sketch on the jacket of ''City of Quartz,'' published in 1990, was pugnaciously proletarian, describing the author (under a ferocious photograph) as ''a former meatcutter and long-distance truck driver.'' Since the success of that book, Davis has been lionized and his radical fangs somewhat blunted. Nowadays, there is less meat cleaver and teamster machismo attaching to his image. He has taken up various university posts and even received the accolade of a MacArthur ''genius'' grant.

The subject that Davis has made peculiarly his own is the modern metropolis, Cobbett's ''great wen.'' For Davis, it is a city of dreadful night, a city of destruction, Vanity Fair. Carthage, for Davis, is always delenda, Pompeii always in its last days.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/books/review/03SUTHERT.html

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Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org

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