Mike Davis. 
 
The New Press: 2002. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Wide octavo. Spine ever so slightly leaned. 432 pages. Near Fine. Jacket very good. Flat signed by Davis on the title page. 
 
On Davis' Dead Cities world tour: Vegas bombing its own hotels. The devastation of the US southwest by nuclear testing. The dismantling of Japanese cities as a part of the New Deal. Storms levelling Montreal and Auckland. Those are a few stops along the way as you zoom through horriying anecdotes, hard data, and complex historical processes Davis shows us to prove his counterintuitive truth: 
 
"In the Americanized big city, the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically generated radical insecurity."