But Davis wrote a whole book The Monster at Our Door with the blurb: 'Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity' condemning the Bush administration for its failure to 'safeguard Americans from the greatest biological threat since HIV/AIDS.'
I don't think I am the only one who said that Davis' methodology was a bit hysterical, in fact I think he got a kicking in both the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books along those lines.
"Plainly you're not familiar with his work."
Well, I have to admit to giving up on Ecology of Fear two thirds in (it was getting a bit repetitive), but I did enjoy City of Quartz and Prisoners of the American Dream ... and the Verso 'Year Left' collection he edited was pretty good. I tend to agree with those who said that in Ecology of Fear he had substituted a kind of natural catastrophism for the crisis theory he found in Marxism.
Solly Angel who did some of the research for the World Bank's World Development Report begged them not to put the tag on it '100 million slum dwellers' which he rightly said is contemptuous of the homes that people are building in the developing world. What I saw of Davis' Planet of Slums, which takes the World Bank report as unfactoid as its hook, excerpted in the New Left Review made me think that it was hystrionic catastrophism, and the worst kind of slum-porn, straight out of Andrew Mearns and 'The Bitter Cry'. Maybe the book was better.