There were many points where I was like AUGHGGH! I LITERALLY grew UP in Los Angeles, why am I JUST learning about this NOW?! And most of the book is crazy interesting and does a good job in the first section of setting the scene for the circumstances that effected the groups covered in the following chapters.

However - and you should know this is serious because I’m flouting grammatical convention - it does feel a little more a like a sampler platter than a complete meal at times, and the authors REALLY tip their hand in the epilogue. They make a very offhanded mention of ‘the rebirth of downtown property values’ being a positive of Bradley’s mayoral term and just completely leave it at that and like... I’m sorry, what?! I need a lot more context for this remark!! Are they seriously trying to say that badly-renovated theme bars and scummy New York developers have been a positive for the city?! COME ON!! On a less personal note, they also refer to ‘pro-immigrant cardinal... mahony’ and like...... that may be true, but, like, it’s probably one of the last epithets I think of when I think of that guy?

I know it sounds insane, but reading that just made me question everything I’d read in the preceding five hundred pages - like, they’d made a lot of people I’d never heard of sound neat! They must be neat! But then they made stuff I know to have been pretty bad sound weirdly positive in the epilogue, SO WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE?! The worst part is that loads of people who will read this will be recent transplants doing so in their ‘lofts’ (buddy..... those are zoned for residential use...... you don’t have to hide the mattress, the kitties, and the stove to prove you only use it as a studio at any time........ they’re not lofts) and they’ll be like yes, downtown used to be terrible but is very cool now, I like whiskey bars that have had their original elements removed and replaced with eyesore repro garbage, I am so disconnected from everything in this city and the world that I cannot help but take everything at its positive face value and somehow feel self-congratulatory about it? And I would not like to be like those people! So now I’m agitated and my husband is going to have to hear me complain about Tom Gilmore at dinner and whine about how no one who writes about Los Angeles really ‘gets it’ as if there’s even an ‘it’ to ‘get’!!

The worst part is I actually liked this book! I’d actually like a WHOLE book about Gidra, who get a paltry fifteen pages at the end, because they seemed really interesting, and I liked learning about all the women’s groups, and it was cool to get all the details about so many things I knew on a cursory or pop cultural level (riots on the sunset strip, Watts, KPFK, Sister Corita Kent, to name a few) BUT the the epilogue threw me into this strange place of not being able to trust anything SO I DON’T KNOW ANY MORE!

If only I were one of those opportunistic New Yorkers, maybe I’d have something articulate to say! But alas I must default to my scattered-yet-charming hyperbole and cross my fingers attempting to put this stuff into words doesn’t mark me as embarrassingly reactionary! But talking about property values feels reactionary! And very coded! I have to go fold the laundry and try not to think about this any more! Parts of this were good! Maybe I need to stop feeling compelled to read personal essays masquerading as smart people books! Definitely I need to end this review now! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

straight-forward accounts of history are usually my nemeses. i have this fervent, maybe unfounded, but also very very founded, belief that discipline of History is mostly conservative BS -- that restructuring the past into a straight line flattens and, by flattening, can be used as a tool to serve power. that History as some hypothetical, far away entity to "learn" removes the agency from actual history; that we are living history, shaping history now, not separately, outside of history, but inside of history, being subsequently shaped by it and the material conditions we live under. History can be so essentialist; as if certain individuals are worth knowing and others are not; as if certain individuals, very few, have agency while the rest of us watch. history is a process; not isolated facts or acts of greatness or smallness. it happens every day. it's changeable.

i think a good example of "History" is how we talk about Rome. historians seem to really like to lionize, romanticize Rome and its social structures and "democracy." even when criticizing it, we are very interested in Rome. most Romans were enslaved. meanwhile, Roman culture and life and religion is an essential unit in middle/high school history while most courses basically give a big, broad survey of the "dark ages" as if nothing noteworthy happened. yet, during feudalism, no one was enslaved. things weren't great, definitely not utopian, but at least you weren't a slave. at least you had family and friends and a plot or two.

i think History is changing, for the better, but i still don't think it can exist in the form it currently resides as. we need to stop reading history as if ideology or "belief systems" is its base and start reading materialistically. sure, there were "great" ideas throughout history but, i think, very few "ideologies" shaped the way history worked out for most of us. reading history through materialism prioritizes the rest of us, and how we live and fight every day.

this is what Davis and Weiner do. "Set the Night on Fire" is a super straight-forward account of LA in the sixties but, in what's a radical move that really shouldn't be, it prioritizes the movements of the time over the individuals. sure, individuals make up, lead, destroy movements but these fights are only as good as these how these individuals coalesce and protest and loot and riot together. this book is filled with tens of thousands of names of ordinary folks who fought together to liberate LA (mostly) from the LAPD. their methods were different - dancing in the street, protesting, rioting and looting, burning, bearing witness to and reporting on abuses the LA Times wouldn't, singing, fucking, partying, doctoring, lawyering, lobbying, campaigning - but they were all, through their protest, creating a more radical, accepting space. the number of skulls and ribs cracked, kids thrown against cop cars, students handcuffed, and black and brown boys murdered by the LAPD in the last 60 years is almost astronomical and unimaginable. it makes you want to give up. the LAPD, a terrorist organization that unleashes unregulated violence on the vast majority of Angelenos, can still, today, seem unbeatable. every mayoral candidate currently running to replace Garcetti (except one), from the most to least liberal, all support re-funding this monstrous killing machine. it's like we're stuck in a cycle.

and we are. but the only thing that has kept LA from turning into an all-out fascist city-state are the everyday communities tactically organizing for liberation. this book is dedicated to these folks. specifically, the movement elders who were organizing for an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist city long before those buzzwords were posted about in sky blue and baby pink on Instagram. the complexities of these movements and coalitions are perhaps the strength of this book. too oft in History, we look at how things just "happened." nothing just happens. months and years and hours of labor and blood go into each of these movements. the planning it took to make the Freedom Summers a success or the East LA high school Blowouts even possible was intricate and tumultuous and almost impossible. civil rights didn't just "happen"; the chief of the LAPD didn't wake up one day and suddenly decide to support integration. someone needed to throw a stone at his head first.

writing this review, all of this kinda seems obvious. of course, these fights were organized! but i don't often think it is. i had never experienced a history that talked so deeply through community organizing structures and just how folks mobilized to put their bodies on the line. and so many people put their bodies on the line. so many kids went to the South to have their backs broken by skinheads and so many people risked arrest and inevitably getting beaten by the cops and so many people stood in the line of gunfire. people planned this shit. it was brave but purposefully so; it didn't come out of thin air. and the bravery in this volume is overwhelming. it will make you weep. our elders have done so much.

in the end, fuck the lapd fuck the lapd fuck the lapd. and bless the black and brown communities, past and present who never stopped fighting in the face of a world that did everything it could to, literally, break them. utopia is created in resistance.

the lasting image, for me, from this book is a huge crowd of Watts residents protecting one of their own by surrounding a police car and stoning it. as the police presence increased, so did the crowd -- of all ages, genders. the 60s were war but they also showed that we could imagine, and live, something better. but only if we did it together. we can build broad coalitions. this book breathes so much fire into History. it's like a street party that goes way past curfew. you're high as fuck, drunk as fuck. you're dancing with your best friends. this is History. it sets the night on fire!!!!!

I grew up in the 60's and lived in Inglewood which is relatively close to Watts, we were within the curfew area. I recall driving down Main Street in Watts, being a teenager, with my Dad. Initially I found the title to the book intriguing and didn't know it would such a lopsided view - of what took place during that era of history. It is a major commitment to read a 638 page book. I truly give it my all but found that the view points put forth and the subject matter were so narrow and opiniated to be radical and not fairly portrayed - the authors interjected their evaluation at every point so I found it to be unbalanced. It went beyond to the point that whatever the Blacks did - they had/have every right as they were wronged and looting and social discourse was expected and highly valued - this is the message of the authors. Also the 6o's were NOT just about the Blacks and social injustices - the book is very narrow in it's focus and I would not recommend it to anyone. It is very judgmental against the LAPD and government officials claiming racial injustice by ALL.
This is not investigative reporting at its' best, rather a radical, biased view that serves no purpose than to point, blame, and condemn. Racial equality didn't happen over night but this accounting isn't accurate, in my view. I know and like many blacks that are conservative in their thinking - this book would make you think those blacks don't exist - wrong.

More an encyclopedia of several movements than a monograph. Less singularly focused and intense than Davis's other books (haven't read any of Wieners), but a triumph

Really good. I learned so much reading this book, but it didn’t need to be so long.

"Combining comprehensive, mineshaft-deep research with unique firsthand knowledge, their recounting of the radical ’60s in Los Angeles will likely not be surpassed. Davis and Wiener tell a complex story involving webs of relationships along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, and class, in what would today be referred to as intersectionality. One of the major contributions of Set the Night on Fire is the linkage of what have often been viewed as separate events, including the so-called 'Blowouts,' politically inspired secondary-school walkouts that originated among Latino students but soon became multiracial; anti–Vietnam War protests that moved beyond white constituencies to engage Angelenos of color; and black cultural articulations that attracted white leftist support."--From Jerald Podair's review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, available here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...

"Wiener and Davis rescue a lot of previously ignored history with an incisive investigation of L.A.’s minority high school student protests in underfunded and criminally neglected schools in minority districts; it is an essential rescued history, a shocking expose on racist school administration and faculty that was part of the systematic city scheme to create underclasses...They also detail the fights of oppressed Mexican American, Chicano, Hispanic, and Latinx communities and their activists’ movements that also were being strong-armed by the police and city government...Always overshadowed by the cultural flashpoint of the Stonewall Riots in New York, the authors chronicle the often lost history of L.A.’s LGBTQ+ protests in L.A., in 1967, that started at the Black Cat bar and led to a resistance movement by gays and lesbians in Los Angeles to stop LAPD shakedowns of gay bars, routine round-up, and violence against the gay community."--From Lew Whittington's review in the New York Journal of Books available here:
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...

Movement history at it's best. Essential reading; 5 stars.

I shall read it later.

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener do a really good job of explaining leftist politics in Los Angeles Conty during the 1960s with special emphasis on Communists and Black actors. Somehow, the LGBT community, with the exception of a brief discussion of Lesbians in the women's movement, gets left out until the last chapter, but that's my problem with it.

This book was incredible. Thorough and beautiful and inspiring. Gave me a foundation for how and why the city I live in is the way that it is.

Really good

As growing up in South Central family living in Nickerson Gardens and Jordan down projects this was very informative I'm a 90's baby I learned alot

A VERY INTERESTING BOOK.