Seriously, because once you read this, the Olympics looks even worse. Davis' book is very readable and wonderfully cited information about slums. It looks at the development and how various governments respond to it. If you have read Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this is a good companion to that...
The Sea of Ash is told from a first person perspective by a school teacher who has won the lottery and taken up a hobby of collecting rare books. He has become obsessed with a rare copy of a Victorian doctor's journal. The teacher goes on a journey to see the sites that are described within the jour...
Dry, statistical -- familiar ground, and a bit out of date (published 2006 and based on projections going back to 2004). Davis blames IMF shock policies over the internally driven tendency of modern "silicon" capitalism to decouple production growth from employment -- which is not fully persuasive. ...
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to give stars to an academic work, so I won't.Read this book.
This is a scary book. The genocidal imperialists in this story are the British (and briefly, the Americans in the Philippines), but dial the clock ahead a hundred years and it’s all us. Seriously. Davis begins his story with a description of ex-president Ulysses Grant’s “family vacation” around t...
Overall, I found the underlying analysis comparing street gangs to other armed youth groups -- militias, child soldiers, terrorists, violent sports fans -- to be a novel and powerful way of rethinking violent cities across the globe. Plus, the histories of the Hamburg Athletic Association (a prime i...
Despite sloppy editing and a somewhat idiosyncratic use of words like "antinomy," the substance of these essays makes for provocative reading.
Though I agree with other reviewers that Davis is at his best when discussing India, the sections on Brazil, China, and numerous other places (to which he pays insufficient attention, truly) are generally informative. Perhaps it's fair to say that he establishes his argument on the basis of the Brit...
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