Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power\u2014where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of \u201cAsian American\u201d as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women\u2019s movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture.<\/p>\n
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors\u2019 storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis\u2019s awardwinning L.A. history, City of Quartz<\/em>, Set the Night on Fire<\/em> is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 800 pages \/ April 2020 \/ 9781784780227<\/p>\n <\/p>\n https:\/\/www.versobooks.com\/books\/3164-set-the-night-on-fire<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe familiar, monochromatic picture of Los Angeles in the sixties\u2014all Hollywood pop and Didion ennui\u2014required a million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry to be \u2018edited out of utopia,\u2019 as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it. What those people actually did, alongside antiwar feminists, high school students, and others, is the heart of this book, and it\u2019s a big heart. No one could tell these intersecting stories better than Davis and Wiener, and their book gives us back a great city\u2019s greatness in its movements, edges, and other centers, so many of them forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThe great task of Set the Night on Fire<\/em> is to remedy the erasures of the black, brown and queer activists who put their bodies on the line. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener remind us that what there is of progressivism in the city today (we can debate how much) has a very deep history of struggle against unforgiving reactionary forces. Revolutionary artist-nuns, educator-organizers and free-jazz visionaries are just a few of a vast cast of characters that together paint a stirring portrait of a visionary Los Angeles ever-emerging from the shadows of the old order. It\u2019s high time radical LA came out of the closet. This book blows the door wide open. Viva Los Angeles Libre!\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Rub\u00e9n Mart\u00ednez, author of Desert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cDavis\u2019s and Wiener\u2019s L.A. is not the glossy theme park of mansions, beaches, and glitzed-up noir, but the undercity of outsiders struggling to get out from under the savage police to stake out a place in the sun. Their book is a rare and necessary saga of unsung heroes, vicious authorities, and unpunished crimes\u2014a timely reminder of opportunities seized and opportunities wasted.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThis is history from below, in the very best sense, focusing on grassroots heroes and struggles. A magnificent mural of the local Sixties, written with verve and passion by two of my favorite locals.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThis huge and exhilarating work of history aims to restore some depth and accuracy to how we talk about Los Angeles in the 1960s \u2026 Davis and Wiener have created an important book to read in a time where LA needs more than ever to be mobilized.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 John Freeman, Lit Hub (\u201cMost Anticipated Books of 2020\u201d)<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cFrom the Ash Grove to Aztl\u00e1n, from the Valley to Vietnam, it\u2019s all here. Step inside and meet an amazing array of characters who risked life and limb to drag the City of Angels out of the dark ages. In showing how struggles for free health care, adequate housing, functional schools, racial and sexual liberation, new forms of creative expression, and the human right of freedom from brutal police violence came together into a mighty torrent, Wiener and Davis have written a revolutionary history for an age of continuing contradictions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cA richly detailed portrait of a city that seethed with rebellious energy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cSet the Night on Fire fixes on one mission\u2014collate the stories of emancipation struggle in \u201960s LA\u2014and runs with it, using document research to complete the job. This is the approach Davis has been using in the twenty-first century, and it works.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAn indispensable portrait of an unexplored chapter in the history of American progressivism.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/a>, 20 April 2020<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cInsightful and innovative …\u00a0Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is both a fierce political and cultural history and a geographic corrective.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 William Deverell, Alta<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAuthoritative and impressive … Set the Night on Fire is an essential reference to L.A.\u2019s rich history of civil unrest, with a hopeful undercurrent. Movements can and often do force change.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein, Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a>, 20 April 2020<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cA monumental history of rebellion and resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cCombining comprehensive, mineshaft-deep research with unique firsthand knowledge, [Davis and Wiener’s] recounting of the radical \u201960s in Los Angeles will likely not be surpassed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Jerald Podair, Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cSet the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is a book as vast as the city itself.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cMonumental. … For new generations growing up in a city whose very history is rarely acknowledged to exist, Set the Night on Fire is a vital primer in resistance, a gift to the future from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Ben Ehrenreich, Guardian<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThese are war stories, the intended audience of which is the young organizers of today, many of them the children and grandchildren of his friends and heroes in the sixties.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Dana Goodyear, New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAnyone familiar with Mike Davis\u2019s magisterial social history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, will know what to expect in terms of the epic sweep and questioning tone of Set the Night on Fire.\u00a0This time, the focus is firmly on race and rebellion, but he and Wiener also map out the myriad protest movements, countercultural voices and campaigns that made 1960s Los Angeles an altogether more edgy and volatile city than the state\u2019s hippy capital, San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Sean O’Hagan, Observer<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cDavis and Wiener have crafted a book that is both encyclopedic and prophetic, scholarly and polemical \u2026 Readers would be hard-pressed to find better guides for a tour of leftist Los Angeles.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Sean Dempsey, S.J., America magazine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThis very readable but meticulously detailed year-by-year account has relevance far beyond its time and place. The sixties were a decade that shaped politics for half a century and the authors show how different struggles were interlinked across the US.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Glyn Robbins, Morning Star<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAn essential rescued history\u201d<\/p>\n