Largely a rehashing of other nonfiction books on LA, most of which covered the subjects more entertainingly. Becomes a slog by page 350.

Spanning the period from 1960 into the early 1970’s, Set the Night on Fire reads like a people’s history of Los Angeles. In this book, Davis and Weiner follow the varied movements, protests, and politicians that defined this period of change and turmoil in the City of Angels. Packed cover to cover with informative firsthand accounts, the book explores everything from the Watts Rebellion and school reform, to pre-Stonewall LGBT organizing and the budding Chicano movement.

Each chapter guides the reader through a different political group or historical moment, introducing the key players and critical turning points. While the authors provide a surfeit of details to sift through that can easily overwhelm, they still manage to skillfully tie the threads together into a complete picture of the explosive city that was Los Angeles in the 1960’s.

The definitive history of LA in the 60's. So many events and things that happened that shaped the way LA is today (like how the west side started voting for the Democrats because many activists were beaten by the LAPD at a rally against LBJ and Vietnam in the newly opened Century City business district. Such a great book if you want to understand modern Los Angeles!

In this 800-page historical book, authors Mike Davis and Jon Wiener deconstruct the romanticism of L.A. in the 60s. They start off stating that "since the debut of the TV show 77 Sunset Strip in 1958, followed by the first of the Gidget romance films in 1959 and then the Beach Boys' "Surfin' in the USA" in 1963, teenagers in the rest of the country had become intoxicated with images of the endless summer that supposedly defined adolescence in Southern California." Davis and Wiener spend the rest of the text erasing this "illusion that Los Angeles was a youth paradise." The authors carefully walk through the decade chronologically while also emphasizing events before and after that still had an impact on the sixties.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about this book is that it focuses on minorities in L.A.--Africans, Chicanos, Asians, LGBT, and even women. There is no one year dedicated to each minority. In fact, Set the Night on Fire shows how each minority was struggling for a place in L.A. simultaneously. Another similarity these minority groups shared was the abuse of Police authority and media influence. White people in power and police officers succumbed to what could only be labeled as fear and dictated what these minority groups could and could not do, where they could live, where they could visit, etc. It is no wonder America had a white-bias, romanticized, false view of L.A. in the sixties when the white people of L.A. were controlling and obscuring the truth.

Through extensive detail of each year throughout the decade, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener shed light on the happenings of the sixties in Los Angeles. While the title of Set the Night on Fire is accurate, perhaps they are also setting fire to the long-held White illusion of Los Angeles.

Overall, this book was extremely interesting to dive into. However, 800 pages seemed extensive for this kind of historical overview.

A thorough, well-researched history of Los Angeles, Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, documents the complex histories of several communities and movements in LA. This comprehensive book recounts details omitted from many U.S. history classes and fills those gaps by bringing often ignored groups into the spotlight. Though LA is not representative of the nation as a whole, this book chronicles many of the movements, relationships, and events that later gave rise to nationwide change.

While the book long, the engaging writing style holds the attention of the reader throughout and is well organized. The reader could comfortably read a chapter or two each night. The details presented in each section allow the reader to understand the evolution of the movements and relationships described in the book. These details allow the reader to visualize the steps toward change rather than stopping at an indication that change occurred. This book is a compelling read even for those without an attachment to the city of Los Angeles.

Contemporary change-makers looking for inspiration can use this book to learn about the successful movements of the sixties and their tactics. So many of the tactics are worth revisiting today.

As an individual who studies social injustices and reform academically, I found Mike Davis and John Wiener’s book Set the Night on Fire to embody rich historical accuracy. Exemplifying topics of race, society, and social injustices during 1960’s, will leave readers feeling enlightened. Flawlessly executing the delicate balance of logos, pathos, and ethos to support the story’s credibility, Set the Night on Fire captures a wide range of readers and learners. This book definitely deserves a spot next to top-shelf comparable titles such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Susan Burton’s Becoming Ms. Burton. For those interested in another brilliant book to support the cause, please do not hesitate to pick up this emotionally raw and eye-opening detailed piece of history!

An extremely readable, large-scale history of LA, told from the bottom-up through its various left wing movements. Unlike Mike Davis' City of Quartz and other work on LA, this book is more preoccupied with storytelling than with analysis. As such, it captures the drama of 60s radicalism, but does not necessarily find ways to generalize the things that can be learned from it.

The absolute highlight of the book is its writing on the LAPD. Davis and Wiener follow the department from its attempts to root out corruption under William Parker, through its various hostile interactions with activists over the next decade. What emerges is a portrait of a department which has nothing to do with enforcing the law or ensuring public safety, but rather exists as a repressive force, terrorizing all those opposing the status quo outside of certain narrow, acceptable channels. The Police are the one constant thread running from the beginning of the book to the end, to the point that this could almost be considered a political history of the Los Angeles Police.

Spectacular. Full review to come

An incredibly expansive look at Black, Chicanx, and social movements in LA over the 60s. I would’ve liked more on Asian Americans as there was only a tiny teeny section at the end about the Gidra magazine. The LAPD continues to surveil and prosecute Black and Brown communities as it did decades ago.

This book brought me back to AP US History in the best possible way. Immersing myself in the captivating and turbulent history of Los Angeles through Davis' lens was a great experience. Set the Night on Fire offered a newfound understanding -- historical, personal, archival, anecdotal, or otherwise -- of the city I've come to think of as a home. I am grateful for this book and the opportunity to further my pursuits of engaged and informed citizenship. It's like La La Land if it was based on the "Where History Is A Struggle" Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. This is possibly the longest book I have read, but the writing of Mike Davis kept me continuously engaged. His dramatic, intriguing, and captivating storytelling made the complex history of LA incredibly engaging -- each chapter unfolded as a gripping narrative, revealing the struggles, movements, and events that shaped the city.

The meticulous research of the authors was actually crazy, it was thoroughly impressive and inspiring in my own research endeavors. It brought to life the voices and stories of activists, residents, and more who fought for justice and change, as well as shedding light on the immense challenges that movements faced. Would highly recommend a chapter or two that piques your personal interest (table of contents is a beautiful thing). This book is a great read for anyone looking to understand the complex tapestry of Los Angeles and its spirit of resistance and resilience.

I learned a lot about the political movements and the injustices committed by the LAPD. I was interested in this book because I didn't know much about recent American history, as I usually study European history and history predating the independence of the US. 800 pages was a tough read, but I had plenty of time over the summer and I absolutely recommend it to anybody even slightly interested in learning about it. It's not difficult to draw parallels to current movements like the Black Lives Matter campaign, and being able to compare the unjust actions between then and now was interesting, to say the least.

Set the Night on Fire is Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's gift to the next generation.

Davis' credentials as an an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian combine with the journalistic voice of co-author, Jon Wiener, history professor Emeritus at UC Irvine who's been a contributing editor to The Nation since 1984 to write a history of the sixties and Los Angeles that stands up to the hype. As acclaimed sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich notes in the cover of Set the Night on Fire: this is a history of the sixties written by “two of many peoples’ favorite locals.” It's worth noting that both Davis and Wiener are not only historians of the 1960s, but were active participants each in their own capacity in many of the social movements discussed in this book, including Davis' leadership in the Los Angeles Chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, the anti-war movement on university campuses, the Southern California branch of the Communist Party and the rank-and-file Teamsters movement. Also a member of SDS though on the East Coast, Jon became politicized by the events of Mississippi, Birmingham and Selma and became a journalist working on and in the anti-war movement before moving to Los Angeles in 1969 where as he says there was no shortage of things to report about including the trial to Free Angela Davis and the repression of the Black Panther Party and Cuban reactionary activity.

Though nearly-800 page, Set the Night on Fire manages to feel at times too brief. That isn't only a commentary on the questions it raises but doesn't answer about political theory or methodology (these things are easy enough for an educated reader to infer). Written as a series of short vignettes in more or less chronological order, the authors transport the reader into the 1960s and early 1970s through traditional archives but also their own memory (including diary entries of Davis' experience during the days of the Watts Rebellion).

In Los Angeles, the authors argue, many social movements were anything but insular (where they were separatist in nature, this was often a concerted and political decision): movements for civil rights, housing, education, desegregation, black liberation, the establishment of African American and Chicana/o Studies, anti-war, and of course rock and roll and counterculture (Set the Night on Fire is a reference to a song by The Doors).

Forget everything you know about the 60s, the book seems to say. At least that's how I felt even as someone with more or less expert knowledge of the origins of Chicano movement (I'm a PhD student in the field of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA). If the political argument structuring the book is that the defeats at the level of reforms in the early part of the decade foreclosed avenues for peaceful change toward the end of the decade, then at least one important provocation this book should hold for future generations of lay and academic historians alike is a curiosity about how these untold and buried transmissions of memory can inform future studies and future struggles. I see many a future dissertation emerging from the memories in these pages.