Reading list

Mike Davis: Prophetic Marxist Historian and Activist

Complete your Mike Davis book shelf!

Verso Books28 June 2024

Mike Davis: Prophetic Marxist Historian and Activist

The legendary Marxist thinker and activist Mike Davis explored political power and social class for decades. As a long-time editor at New Left Review, and contributor to Los Angeles Review of Books, Socialist Review and others, his sharp analysis and glittering prose criss-crossed over urban studies, political economy, social theory, and US history to reveal the ravages of global capitalism on people and planet as well as areas for resistance.

Mike Davis chronicles the Dickensian underworld of day labor in New York, tracks the development of new ecologies and levels of development along the border, and examines the shifting realities of life and work for Latinos in US cities. The cosmopolitan result of the Latinization of America’s cities “is a rich, constantly evolving” culture that has the potential to become a radical new American counterculture.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

Student reading sale: ends September 30
30% off if you buy 3 or more titles
40% off if you buy 4 or more titles
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.
See all our Student Reading here.

The Essential Mike Davis

[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]

Listen to Mike’s close friend and comrade Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in conversation with Owen Hatherley on The Verso Podcast discussing his life, legacy, and the geography of struggle.

VersoBooks · Building the Ark: The Life and Legacy of Mike Davis | Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Owen Hatherley

 

Magical Urbanism
Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardA CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. ...
Ecology of Fear
Counterpointing Los Angeles’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real his...
The Monster Enters
In his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis expl...
Planet of Slums
According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically u...
City of Quartz
No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...
Old Gods, New Enigmas
Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an...
Set the Night on Fire
Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...
Prisoners of the American Dream
Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...
Late Victorian Holocausts
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship betw...
Buda's Wagon
On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s...

Filed under: author-bookshelves, author-davis-mike, mike-davis, student-reading, us-politics, versoreadinglists