If you have ever been to Los Angeles or plan on visiting I highly recommend reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis.

Mike offers a cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles from the eyes of a scholar written like a noir novel.   It is a riveting book and a must read for anyone interested in urbanization.   True brilliance.    (If you like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy you will love this)

  Other books by Mike Davis I recommend:

Ecology of Fear and Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums  is especially timely since it talks about the history of disease, the environment, and population growth in the cities that we can't control.        If you are interested in the human footprint and society as we know it today-Read Mike Davis.

All these books are available at Amazon.com

A little about Mr. Davis, courtesy of Random House, Inc.

A former meatcutter and long-distance truck driver, Mike Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was a fellow at the Getty Institute, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.  He was born in Fontana, a suburb of Los Angeles, and now lives in Pasadena.

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