Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster - Softcover

In this extraordinary book, Mike Davis unravels the secret political history of disaster, real and imaginary, in Southern California. From killer bees to earthquakes to racial hostility, Ecology of Fear is an essential portrait of America at the millennium. `If Davis takes a darkling view of the Californian dream, there is nothing dim or dull about his book. His great strengths are a vigorous prose style . . . a provocative thesis . . . and a dizzying catalogue of delicious, and sometimes frightening, facts' New York Times `Davis is a wonderful writer . . . He keeps us from turning away from what we'd rather not see' The Times `Seldom has there been a messenger so prepared to thrust himself forward with bad news in the certain knowledge that the great and the good will not be happy . . . There is something particularly bracing about four hundred pages of Mike Davis's righteous anger, but the inhabitants of other great cities, with their own great crimes, should read him in fear and trembling' New Statesman

Mike Davis was born in 1946. He has written frequently for, among others, The Nation and the UK's New Statesman. He is currently a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and was an editor of New Left Review.