Excellent alt history, refreshing change to the usual institutional, "establishment" analyses. Similar in approach to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Marred, however, by shoddy editing. Just one glaring example: reference, in a note about NYC mayors, is made to somebody called "Blumenberg." I assume they mean Bloomberg.

Set the Night on Fire is an in-depth and complex look at the history that created the sprawling city of L.A. It starts off by enumerating the factors that contributed to the uprisings that transformed not just life in LA but life in America during the sixties. Mike David does an excellent job of laying out the convoluted ties between the different players in the game and shows how each aspect of the cultural anathema evolved throughout the years until hitting a point of firm resolve. This book brings to light the dark history and realities of America in the sixties and forces readers to acknowledge the absolutely horrific ordeals that white right leaning Americans forced on minority communities.

While at times this book was as sprawling and twisted as L.A. itself is, the sprawling nature seemed necessary to encapsulate the complex factors of how L.A. came to be what it is now. It is a well researched and well written book and should be at the top of anyone’s list for a more nuanced look and realistic perspective of the social, cultural, and political landscape of L.A. in the sixties.

With new names and characters every few sentences, Set the Night on Fire really brings the human aspect of this time period to the forefront and tells and interwoven story by penning the lives of countless players, on every side of the game. The passion and raw emotion of L.A. in the sixties plays out in this book and really drove the narrative forward.

I had very high hopes for this book and it filled in a lot of gaps for the period I was a little too young to fully grasp. Unfortunately, it reads more like a catalog of events and entities and less like a true history of the period and its implications. High marks for research, less high marks for writing.

Took my time reading this but it has so much happening that you need a break now and then.
What a crazy turbulent time the 60s and 70s were in Los Angeles.
Bombings, Black Panthers, Vietnam protests, the music scene, the cruel racist LAPD, Patty Hearst and her wacky side lines. This book is a documentary waiting to be narrated by Ken Burns.
Incredibly researched and the bibliography will keep you busy with many more years of reading.
Made me never want to visit LA.

In tribute to Mike Davis’s recent passing, I decided to read his last book. As a displaced Californian, I like reading intellectually astute books on California. In books like "City of Quartz" (1990), Davis writes about Los Angeles with fondness, nostalgia, and critical acumen. In "Where I Am From" (2003), Joan Didion writes about growing up in Sacramento but ultimately feeling quite alienated from the cultures of her city and state. In his "L.A. Weekly" columns and "Counterintelligence: Where We Eat in the Real L.A." (2000) the pulitzer prize winning food writer, Jonathan Gold writes about driving all over L.A. to eat the myriad of foods the region serves up. I find the joy he takes in the food, his deep knowledge of Southern California, and his nostalgia very attractive. Yes, I’m reading "Set the Night on Fire" for its nostalgic charge.

Frank Zappa regularly dissed San Francisco and Northern California because the media and the music industry paid too much attention to its hippie culture, art, and music. Zappa thought that Southern California was overlooked in spite of producing extraordinarily innovative and creative musicians, artists, etc. He was particularly thinking about the freaks–free thinkers, creative artists, intellectually and emotionally open, questioners of the status quo–who preceded the hippies and for whom Zappa named the first Mothers of Invention album, "Freak Out!" (1966).

The introduction of "Set the Night on Fire"–actually the rest of the book as well–reminds me of Zappa’s take on Southern California, because Davis and Wiener too celebrate the originality, firsts, and creative potential in the region for those agitating for the historical changes that were sweeping the US in the 1960s. To be a bit more precise, Davis and Wiener analyze how African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, gay men, artists, college students, high school students, junior high school students, women, nuns, teenagers on the Sunset Strip, the underground press, alternative radio, the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, folk musicians, jazz musicians, people who lived in beach communities, westside liberals and progressives, communists, Angela Davis, Tom Bradley–among many other individuals and groups–fought to change the hydrahead of the Southern California status quo, meaning the white patriarchy that had dominated Southern California since California became a state. This status quo limited, trapped, discounted, dehumanized, and disenfranchised everyone within systems (race, gender, class, sexuality, geography, educational, political, economic, etc.) meant to extract power for patriarchy and leave everyone else SOL.

The thesis of the book: for those who would challenge SoCal white patriarchy (see list above), the powers that be would first employ dirty tricks and then unleash the LAPD to bash heads, oppress, and violate rights: first trickery, then violence, after which there was inaction/indifference/stalling or legal action to stop any challenges or changes. Rinse and repeat. At every step in this cycle, the individual or group that wanted change (see list above) would need to respond creatively to patriarchy’s relentless attempts to stymie change (justice, fairness, equality, freedom, pursuit of happiness). Every chapter illustrates this pattern. Sometimes those fighting for change (see list above) secure change, sometimes not. Change is slow and comes at a cost: that is the lesson of this lengthy and thorough book.

The Mothers of Invention’s song "Trouble Every Day" from "Freak Out!" should be the soundtrack of "Set the Night on Fire."

My reading experience is probably slightly less than a four but this book is ambitious and indispensable for understanding the details dynamics of progressive social movements in my city. I lost the plot a few times in this towering tome but I’ve come away from it enlivened and enriched by the spirit of resistance that we need so much today. Much gratitude for the authors efforts in compiling this people’s history.

another libby hold that i will only be able to read LIKE THREE MONTHS FROM NOW bc buying the audiobook would cost me THIRTY FOUR DOLLARS? HELLO??? the actual physical copy is buried underneath my car seat i think

I read this comprehensive history of the Leftist movement in Los Angeles during the 1960s to learn more about my adopted home as well as to better understand our current sociopolitical situation; the origins of it are all here. The book doesn't so much tell a story about the decade as it provides a chronicle of it. For that reason, it is almost encyclopedic, and I took breaks in between sections to read fiction so as not to be overwhelmed with information. Still, I highlighted much that I will inevitably return to over the years. It is striking how little the oppressors' playbook has changed in 50+ years. It is equally striking how effective that playbook remains with the public at large. Separately, and finally, it is just as striking how movements and organizations always tend to fracture based on the desires of individuals and the realities of exhaustion. What this means for the future, today, in a society that is more impatient than ever I am not so sure.

Very detailed and expansive history of Los Angeles with some 1950s and 1970s background for clarity.

This isn’t really a history of LA, it’s more a history of social movements and how they operated in opposition to the LAPD, told from an unapologetically left leaning perspective. The movements covered are primarily ones related to Black liberation and I think the authors might have done better to purposefully limited their book to those movements as Chicano movements get obviously short shrift and Asian activists don’t turn up until the last section— it feels laughably tacked on.

This book is well worth reading, but it’s a bit like trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose. There’s just a lot here and it’s best read as a collection of discrete articles, rather than a book with a narrative arc. I often had the feeling that I missed some important piece of information and struggled to keep all of the acronyms straight. It’s a book that probably needs to be read twice to understand properly, but about two thirds of the way in it became a bit of a slog and I just don’t know when I’ll have the fortitude to attempt a re-read.

Marvelous. Well organized and incredibly comprehensive, this book is a great account of LA in the sixties, told with love by activists. The authors' first-hand experience with the events and the political landscape gives one the sense of an insider perspective - like talking to the locals on the streets instead of just reading the news. Loved it.

Very good book by an author who is known as an authority on LA history.
Although this book is not completely objective as Mike Davis has obvious leftist leanings, with prose sometimes more inflammatory than neutral, the content is very well presented.
I had originally heard about the author in regards to City of Quartz. Although I have not had the opportunity to read that yet, I found and read this book first.
It is quite amazing the sheer amount of social turmoil in an equally turbulent decade although this book could also include the first few years of the 1970s too.
It was also good that is did not lose focus and discuss other events outside of the US during the period in question as this is specifically a book about LA history. This is sometimes an error other writers or journalists make when writing. Looking forward to reading more of Mike Davis books.