This is a great book ive learned alot from this book about the 60s in l.a. that i never knew about. Like the the gay movement the black movement womens rights etc.. Alot of interesting facts in this book i love reading about all the history back in the day and this book has alot of it. A book you can't put down until the end. I highly recommend reading this book. The Authors did a great job bringing everything to life.

A little too sprawling and unfocused like davis’ more recent work. Lots of great insights in here tho definitely worth reading.

Mike Davis strikes again. About as lucid and intelligent an observer of American life as I can imagine, Davis celebrates the now sadly largely forgotten social movements that played a major role in LA life in the 1960s, castigates the figures in politics, policing, and organized religion that deserve castigating, and elevates the working class of a great American city to the heroic role it deserves -- black, Chicano (a basically out-of-date term, but the one they preferred at the time), Asian, and white, queer and straight. The lines of the struggle are clearly drawn, the successes and failures clearly elucidated. Granted, he does fall a bit into a classic trap of leftist historiography, one exemplified by Howard Zinn, in which every ordinary person is a militant-in-waiting, but he does it less than Zinn. And he carries far too much water for Ron Karenga, a man rightly regarded by the Black Panthers as an absolute clown at best and a stooge for the feds and woman-beater at worst. But these are minor quibbles -- the whole is a fantastic history.

I just LOVED diving into this book. Filled in a lot of blanks for me in my overview of US liberation movements of the '60s. It painted a picture of what can happen when we collaborate and/or agitate for change. I was particularly struck by the INCREDIBLE movements around Watts post-rebellion and the LA Free Clinic. I enjoyed the relatively quick but deep dives into everything from the underground press to Free Venice to the Chicano Blowouts, the creation of MEChA and the Brown Beret occupation of Catalina Island. I was so depressed at first because I felt we had gained no ground from then to now, ultimately I saw how much was accomplished and recognised the legacy of all of the people who made the movements and was inspired as well. This book is super long but it flows by fast because it is riveting and packed with research. All Power to the People. Read it!

1960s-70s Los Angeles had too many historical moments and names to be packed into a thin volume of 800 pages. And it would take another 400 pages to give Asian American and feminist movements a fairer share of the book. The Cold War politics looming large (and in particular the Vietnam War), Southern California became a center of the whirlwind of civil rights movements against the dangerous white supremacist axis of Sheriff William Parker (and the notoriously brutal LAPD), Mayor Sam Yorty, Cardinal McIntyre, and Governor Ronald Reagan.

Though a relatively dry historical tour of (New) Left ideals, infighting, factionalism, and FBI’s infiltration, it was nevertheless a much wanted reconnection to a moving geography of LA, with hippie music along the way: from South Central to East LA, Downtown, Torrance, Sunset Blvd., Wilshire Blvd., Vermont Ave., Santa Monica, Venice Beach, San Fernando Valley—and most dearly, UCLA, my alma mater. “Dearly” not just in the sense of familiarity, but of an embarrassing realization of how little of its pioneering and controversial role in 60s politics resonates on today’s campus. Its “international” brand is severed from its “California” persona and vice versa. Much of this has to do with how quickly people and institutions forget the Cold War—its damages, debates, and underground coalition alike—while continuing to live with it. Apparently, the Cold War's legacies are more than shadow politics in this decade, to say the least. Shouldn’t UCLA make part of this book a common text, with which to reframe its California-international chapter? (But, to quote Angela Davis when she gave a political speech at Pauley Pavilion upon her hiring, “it might be overestimating the intelligence of the regents” to expect them to support this.)

As much as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have spilled ink on the expansive list of protests and movements—the Black Panthers, the Watts Renaissance, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Karenga’s (misogynist) back-to-Africa US movement, the countercultural battle on Sunset Strip, Free Angela Davis, The Free Press, MEChA, the creation of Black Studies and Chicano Studies programs, the Brown Berets, the Blowouts, redlining and Fair Housing, the Ash Grove, The Free Clinics, and Gidra—one can’t escape the feeling that it is only the tip of the iceberg that is being written here. The book serves as a point of departure to a longer, perhaps never-ending, journey.

mike davis is the best of us, thankful for the uc system's commies

An important book that could have been improved greatly by some judicious editing. A cultural critic who works on a very high level--his City of Quartz is among the best studies of any American city--Davis knows LA very well, maybe a. bit too well. He and Weiner feel obligated to include every detail they had on the note cards and the result is frequently slightly tedious going. In addition, Davis is clear about his belief that the Communist Party played a central role in the LA counterculture/New Left matrix. He quotes CP members and others from the far left often, and the book's fine as a source if that's your central interest. But he doesn't convince me that the CP was as important as he claims. Similarly, the inside baseball on the Black Panthers and US requires some background to unpack.

For all that, there's a huge amount here that adds something important to the Sixties story, on the Sunset Strip battles, the Chicano Blowouts and Moratorium, and the Black Cat demonstration that basically did what Stonewall did a couple of year earlier.

At 450 pages, it could have a classic; at 700-some, you need to be willing to read past the problems.

This is a fascinating read that lets the reader in on the truth of what LA was really like in the sixties. New York gets a lot of credit and focus for the growth that took place at that time, but LA was much more than just a utopia of Hollywood and movie stars. It was fascinating to learn that the first LGBTQ street protest actually took place in LA and not NYC. In addition, the usual history of Los Angeles does not show the incredible truth of the power that minorities were able to fight for in LA.
This read reveals so much information that everybody should know about the history of Los Angeles and how it effected the growth of America as a whole.
I highly recommend this read.

It took two months to get through the 800 pages, but damn, I’m so proud of myself for finishing it! It’s a fairly exhaustive history of the 1960s in Los Angeles. I was thrilled to read about my hometown and I learned so much. My high school and my father’s university were both mentioned repeatedly and it helped me to contextual the history of my hometown. I wish that equal time would have been given to all the topics, especially the women’s and LGBTQ movements. But it gave me plenty of new books to add to my reading list so I can continue to learn more.

Very wonky. A bit too wonky for me. (I was hoping for a lot more Manson and Laurel Canyon and a lot less community organizing.) That being said - if you are a community organizer in Southern California - then I bet you'd find this book indispensable! It's very well-researeched.

This was a great retrospective, contextualizing for me a lot of movements and events that happened when I was too young to understand what was going on and about which I have not previously had an opportunity to learn about. I really appreciate the optimism reflected by the writers, who believe that grass roots movements can still make a difference.

An important period covering some critical protest developments in civil rights, anti-war and racial discrimination. However unfortunately the book is written more by historians of the period than by journalists or engaging writers, lacking the cultural anecdotes and local colour that engage the reader (cf Dominic Sandbrook, Robert Carro, Rick Perlstein). Consequently the book is an important read, but not necessarily as enjoyable and engaging one as it could have been.