Errors in Mike Davis' Dead Cities, Haymarket edition
December 10, 2024
I recently read the late Mike Davis’s essays on environmental devastation, war, and urban ecology in Dead Cities (2002, now back in print from Haymarket Books). I don’t know if “enjoyable” is the right word for writing on often bleak and enraging topics, but it was a compelling read.
The 2024 Haymarket edition is well done, too, except that in five places, there’s missing text at a page break, between pages 171-2, 318-19, 329-30, 403-4, and 408-9. The corresponding text is also missing in Haymarket’s ebook version. There are also some errors in the endnotes to chapter 17, “Dead Cities: A Natural History,” on pages 397-9.
I checked out the original 2002 New Press edition from the library (ISBN 1-56584-765-2) to fill in the missing text. Here are the details on those printing/typesetting errors. Bold text is missing from the Haymarket edition.
Chapter 8: “The Infinite Game”
Pages 171-2:
[…] In return for supporting a huge increase of the CBD’s tax increment capacity to $5 bil-
lion, the mayor offered to split the addition evenly between CBD redevelopment and citywide housing needs. […]
Chapter 16: “Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage?”
Pages 318-19:
[…] Still, extrapolating from the lunar and Venutian cases, and allowing for differences in gravity and atmospheric density, it has been possible to estimate terrestrial impact frequencies, which can, in turn, be double-checked against the age and size distribution of the 140-plus known cra-
ters. The pioneering calculations of the Shoemakers are reproduced in Table 2.42
Pages 329-30:
[…] In the hour before NASA’s artificial meteor was incinerated, it transmitted data “so offbeat that researchers scrambled to see if their instruments had run amock.”76
Most of the predicted atmospheric water was missing: a shortfall that invalidates existing models of Jupiter’s energy budget and chemistry. […]
Chapter 17: “Dead Cities: A Natural History”
On page 397, the Haymarket (2024) edition incorrectly combines endnotes 23 and 24, then adds two “Missing” endnotes:
- Demographers and population ecologists contrast opportunistic R-selected or ruderal species, whose populations “explode” under favorable circumstances, and equilibrial or K-selected organisms. Rats are spectacular, even monstrous examples of “R-selection.” Litters comprise up to a dozen pups and females are ready to go into heat within 48 hours of giving birth. Young rats can mate at two months.
- (Missing?)
- (Missing?)
- Frederic E. Clements’s Research Methods in Ecology (1905) […]
New Press (2002) edition:
- Demographers and population ecologists contrast opportunistic R-selected or ruderal species, whose populations “explode” under favorable circumstances, and equilibrial or K-selected organisms.
- Rats are spectacular, even monstrous examples of “R-selection.” Litters comprise up to a dozen pups and females are ready to go into heat within 48 hours of giving birth. Young rats can mate at two months.
- Frederic E. Clements’s Research Methods in Ecology (1905) […]
From then on, all endnotes in the Haymarket edition are numbered one greater than they should be, until we get back in sync when endnotes 55 and 56 from the original are incorrectly combined into one endnote numbered 56 in the Haymarket, on p. 399. Haymarket:
- Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York, New York 1993. I disregard the rightwing belief that rent control “killed” affordable housing in New York City and drove landlords to abandon or torch their properties.
New Press:
- Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York, New York 1993.
- I disregard the rightwing belief that rent control “killed” affordable housing in New York City and drove landlords to abandon or torch their properties.
Chapter 18: “Strange Times Begin”
Pages 403-4:
Consider, first, the persistent summer monsoon failures and severe droughts that have so troubled the humid as well as semi-arid parts of East Asia for most of the
1990s and which may prefigure “normal” weather in the age of global warming.4 Here climate change is colliding head-on with economic models based on unsustainable booms in commercial agriculture and forestry. […]
Pages 408-9:
As Louis Francoeur, one of the [sic] Montréal’s best-known progressive journalists, later pointed out, the heroism of Hydro-Québec’s linemen and blue-collar employees, who worked day after day without sleep to rebuild 30,000 toppled
power poles, was used to deflect any criticism of the monster utility, which, wracked by recent financial scandals, has long been the principal enemy of Québec environmentalists and native peoples. […]
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