Mike Davis

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 Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West - a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.

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 industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the reelection of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Considered by many to be Ireland's most important revolutionary, James Connolly devoted his life to struggles against exploitation, oppression and imperialism. Active across the world, Connolly was a peerless organiser, sharp polemicist, and highly original thinker. This collection of his most important writings, with an extensive introduction from the editor, returns Connolly to his proper place in Irish and global history, and seeks to inspire people today with his vision of a world free of militarism, injustice and deprivation.

Countering the chorus of anti-immigrant voices that have grown increasingly loud in the current political moment, No One is Illegal exposes the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and puts a human face on the immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. This second edition has a new introduction to frame the analysis of the struggle for immigrant rights and the roots of the backlash.

Third and final instalment of Shawn McQueen Trilogy: The story of three surfers: Brian Shafter, Scientist Harry Cook and surfboard shaper Shawn McQueen. Five years separating each of the three men and from vastly different backgrounds travel life's journey in search of the answer to life's ultimate question: What is the meaning of life? The book opens in the late 1940's: Brian Shafter is the eldest of the three and a younger brother. A narcissistic, judgemental, evangelical misfit, with serious sexual orientation issues after being 'interfered with' on a church camping trip as a young boy. He will discover surfing late but soon begins to make a name for himself as small-wave stylist. He will fall in with a bad crowd, run afoul of the law and make a pact with God for not being caught. Riddled with guilt and unrequited love, he marries within his church, migrates to Australia to proselytise the gospel. Five years his junior, Harry Cook is an only child who loses his beloved father to cancer and decides to dedicate his life to science to rid mankind of this scourge. A brilliant student, Harry accepts a study grant to head up a research team for a major agricultural chemical company. What Harry discovers will cause him to throw in his career and flee for his life because he's blown the whistle on the most carcinogenic chemical known to man and a plan for the multi-national company to eliminate all pollinators and force agriculture into a total dependence on their product. A fugitive from big-Ag thugs he flees. Shawn McQueen is the youngest surfer of the three, a philosophical, older brother and a bit of a surfing prodigy who will grow up to be a leading surfboard shaper and a pacifist who will move to Australia in the late sixties. Surfing is the bond between these three men who remain friends for decades as the years pass. Brian will become a huge surf retailer in Sydney, Australia, Shawn will become a gypsey surfboard shaper who will settle in Noosa and Harry will disappear at sea after the research vessel he is working on sinks mysteriously with all on board. Recently widowed, pacifist Shawn buil an ocean going catamaran, takes-out the world's most wanted terrorist, and follows a girl with sea-green eyes to the dusty mountains of Afghanistan to help her rebuild her broken country. After a time in-country he leaves the troubled Afghanistan and returns to Australia where he meets a surfing girl and falls in love again. Things are wonderful until the late nineties, when a mutating, specie-jumping virus quickly becomes the pandemic extinction event that will end all life on planet. As the extinction event quickly shuts down the planet, a terminally ill Harry mysteriously appears at the gate of Shawn's acreage outside of Noosa after years of being missing and presumed dead. The three men who have seen and experienced much will spend the last weeks of life on Earth discussing the meaning of life. Only one will reveal the absolute truth and emerge as the Holy Man. Will it be the proclaimed man of God? Will it be the scientist? Or will it be the philosophical surfboard shaper? Who will be the Omega man who put the tools away and turn-off the lights for the last time?

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 between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

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 prototype the car bomb has evolved into a "poor man's air force," a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this provocative history, Mike Davis traces the its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies-particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan-in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with "rings of steel" against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

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 unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Surfboard shaper, Medford Haley arrives in California to do a three-hundred board shaping contract only to find that Clark Foam has shut down and there are no blanks. With three months to kill on his ticket, a rent a wreck burning dollar-bills at the curb, he looks up his long lost bud, legendary surfer/shaper/ballplayer, John 'Bubba' Bradbury in Venice Beach, home to musicians, artists, body builders and any number of odd-bod movie extras. A place where 'freaks' or outsiders just kind of blend in. Bubba, who is in the process of putting together a momentous baseball game, 'A battle of the titans'; asks Medford whose Gramps was a pro ballplayer to stick around and keep him company because the steroids he takes for his pitching elbow causes severe anxiety and panic attacks. Having played a lot of ball with Bubba, Medford agrees to help in the training and recruitment program for the big game. John 'Bubba' Bradbury's dream of pitching one last game against the best of all time with a team consisting exclusively of dis-qualified mavericks, misfits and downright drug-crazed outlaws, fruit-loop eccentrics with oddball nicknames and mental disorders still looking for names and crippling superstitions to challenge Leavenworth Federal Prison Warden's pet team of caged, iron-pumping one-eyed, mutants fuelled by rage. Medford takes one look and mutters reflectively, 'Business as usual.' Enter Aglakti 'Aggie' Anumiaq, an Inuit boy, fresh out of Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and former member of their mutant 'Lifers' baseball team, here to try out for Bubba's team of freaks. Aggie: whose name in the Inuit language literally means: One who makes words stand or 'Songmaker' had served five-years for assaulting federal officers. He believes: that like his ancestors, he must first dream to manifest his future. Happy to re-visit the happy days of his baseball playing youth, Medford takes on the position of manager to help Bubba with his pet projects, remodelling his study at 'Dunrunnin', his house in Venice Beach and moulding dream team of superstar social misfits. Medford will soon remember Bubba's perfectionist side that fuels his severe anxiety affliction and superstitious tendencies. While Aggie revels in the down-souther's life in Venice, he still dreams of his arctic home in Seward Alaska. Then one day, quite by chance he bumps into a childhood girlfriend on the beach who is studying dance in Los Angeles. They learn to surf together and he falls in love. Things go well for the baseball team until some 'gang' members took exception to the team practicing on their turf, attacking Bubba's immaculate Nomad with clubs, shooting and killing two team members in the process. Things continue to deteriorate when Pee Wee, Bubba's best friend and team's dwarf-catcher begins hoeing a Russian Mafia Boss's wife's row, drawing a line in the sand that will bring the Russian Mafia into violent conflict with the Mexican Mafia that will culminate in a deadly turf war in the parking lot of the Santa Barbara City College during 'The Battle of Titans' baseball game at the stadium there. Aggie, who'd been dreaming constantly of Buniq Late Hiin his Inuit childhood sweetheart finally dreams of Bubba's team of freaks winning 'The battle of the titans'. After the game Aggie is offered a position on the San Francisco Giants but changes his mind when he dreams of coming home to Alaska: To Buniq, his father and his own brood of children. It's the story of a young Inuit man's experience of modern dystopia.

Lovecraft eZine is a magazine of Weird Fiction and Cosmic Horror, with over 200,000 readers. Here's the print edition of issue #36 -- thanks for reading TABLE OF CONTENTS Cthulhu Does Stuff #15 a comic strip by Ronnie Tucker & Maxwell Patterson Better Halves by KC Grifant The Last Leaves by Derek Wentz Descent by Christopher M. Cevasco Restless Nights by Justin Munro The Thing in the Corner by David A. Anthony The Pardon of the Fogs by Cora Pop Mortuus Machanus by D. B. Poirier Resonance by Stewart Horn The Voice of Zarnak by Rick Lai White Light Panic by Phillip J. Johnson

Fill the gap between planning and doing with SSIS 2014 The 2014 release of Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services provides enhancements for managing extraction, transformation, and load operations, plus expanded in-memory capabilities, improved disaster recovery, increased scalability, and much more. The increased functionality will streamline your ETL processes and smooth out your workflow, but the catch is that your workflow must change. New tools come with new best practices, and Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Integration Services will keep you ahead of the curve. SQL Server MVP Brian Knight is the most respected name in the business, and your ultimate guide to navigating the changes to use Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2014 to your utmost advantage. Implement new best practices for effective use of SSISWork through tutorials for hands-on learning of complex techniquesRead case studies that illustrate the more advanced conceptsLearn directly from the foremost authority on SSIS SQL Server Integration Services is a complex tool, but it's the lifeblood of your work. You need to know it inside out, and you must understand the full potential of its capabilities in order to use it effectively. You need to make sure the right architecture is in place. Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Integration Services is your roadmap to understanding SSIS on a fundamental level, and setting yourself up for success.