The only muckraking, progressive history of San Diego that covers the city's historically recent turn from red to blue while outlining a new cast of right-wing villains and tenacious activists fighting for social justice.
Three essays on the underside of the city, the real life behind the postcard theme park-now in a new, updated, twentieth-anniversary edition.
San Diego is a paradise in the sun for over thirty million tourists each year, free of the urban ills that afflict other cities. But America's eighth largest metropolis has a dark side of militarization, economic inequality, municipal corruption, and racial injustice. In Under the Perfect Sun, Mike Davis outlines the making and re-making of San Diego by a series of largely unchecked local plutocrats, from the snarling Republicans of old to what he calls "high tech . . . opportunist Clinton Democracy." Davis moves from John D. Spreckels, "King of the Vigilantes," crushing dissent amidst the Free Speech Fight during the Progressive era to a new class of politically shapeshifting business elites ushering in a "tidal wave of gentrification" that continues to the present day.
Jim Miller offers what is essentially a peoples' history of San Diego that gives a bottom-up view from the perspective of activists of all stripes seeking to challenge the local hegemony. Miller's episodic account of rebellion and repression in "America's Finest City" chronicles the struggles of workers, immigrants, civil rights, and anti-war advocates to contest the powers that be. Kelly Mayhew sketches life in vacationland with a series of interviews that reveal the "Other' San Diego." Mayhew includes a wide range of local activists and everyday San Diegans who tell their own stories about what it is like to live and struggle in this tourist wonderland. Life beneath the postcard in this theme-park city is frequently harder than San Diego's marketing suggests. Mike Davis (March 10, 1946 – Oct 25, 2022) was the author many books, including Set the Night on Fire, Old Gods, New Enigmas, City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda's Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award.
Jim Miller is the author of the novels Drift (University of Oklahoma Press), Flash (AK Press), and Last Days in Ocean Beach (City Works Press), co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (The New Press), Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire (The New Press), and the editor of Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (City Works Press), Sunshine/Noir II (City Works Press), and Democracy in Education; Education for Democracy: An Oral History of the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931, 1969-2006 (AFT 1931). He has published columns, reviews, fiction, and poetry in the San Diego Union-Tribune, The San Diego Free Press, The OB Rag, Words and Deeds, American Book Review, Fiction International, New Novel Review, California Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review, and a wide variety of other national and international periodicals. Miller is a professor of English and Labor Studies at San Diego City College and Vice President of Political Action and Community Outreach for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931.
Kelly Mayhew is the co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (The New Press) as well as co-author with Jim Miller of Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire (The New Press), and is co-editor with Alys Masek of Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting (City Works Press), co-editor with Paula S. Rothenberg of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States 9th edition (Worth Publishers), and co-editor with Jim Miller of Sunshine/Noir II: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (City Works Press). She is also a founding member of the San Diego Writers Collective, which created City Works
