City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

This is the book that predicted the 1992 LA riots. Mike Davis gives us a full bore analysis of Los Angeles culture, history, and architecture in this devastating critique of the surveillance society combined with massively racist social inequality of the city of angels. You'll never see any suburb, police substation, or starchitect monument the same way again... much less any place in southern California. Fascinating read, essential for understanding the United States's wack imbalance of power. This book more than holds up as the years go by.