Ever the relentless researcher, America's sharpest urban theorist has turned his eye to 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers and found that its downfall was predicted not by some faux-religious egomaniac like Osama bin Laden but almost one hundred years earlier by H.G. Wells. Yet Davis is not interested in color-by-numbers prophecy as much as he is in dissecting monumental assumptions like civic integrity, ecological symbiosis and self-righteous development. He's spent years trying to wake America up to the ravages it has visited on natural landscapes, how they will someday exact a price human culture won't necessarily be able to pay. And Dead Cities is his latest missive locating Freud's familiar uncanny (the unheimlich that signals the return of the repressed, or sometimes oppressed) in the destruction of cities, the proliferation of human (mostly toxic) waste and thoughtless pollution. If you think that you're somehow innocent to the degradation of Earth, read this book and think again.
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