{"product_id":"set-the-night-on-fire-l-a-in-the-sixties","title":"Set the Night on Fire L.A. in the Sixties","description":"Review\n\nThis huge and exhilarating work of history aims to restore some depth and accuracy to how we talk about Los Angeles in the 1960s ... Davis and Wiener have created an important book to read in a time where LA needs more than ever to be mobilized.\n--John Freeman, Lit Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2020)\nA richly detailed portrait of a city that seethed with rebellious energy.\n--Kirkus\nThere's a monochromatic picture of Los Angeles in the sixties--all Hollywood pop and Didion ennui--that up close turns out to be made of many different colors and a lot more stories. What more than a million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry--'edited out of utopia'--as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it, alongside antiwar feminists and high school students and others did is the heart of this book, and it's a big heart. No one could gather and tell these intersecting stories better than Davis and Wiener, and their book gives us back a great city's greatness in its heroes, movements, edges and other centers, so many of them forgotten.\n--Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir\nFrom the Ash Grove to Aztlán, from the Valley to Vietnam, it's 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.\n--Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles\nDavis's and Wiener's 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--a timely reminder of opportunities seized and opportunities wasted.\n--Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage\nThis 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.\n-- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer\nThe great task of Set the Night on Fire 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's high time radical LA came out of the closet. This book blows the door wide open. Viva Los Angeles Libre!\n--Rubén Martínez, author of Desert America: A Journey Across Our Most Divided Landscape\n\nEssential and long overdue.\n-- David Ulin, Los Angeles Times (Best California books of 2020)\nTwo veteran authors allow themselves vast detail to tell us about the cradle of counterculture, in all the far-flung rebellious meanings of the term. It is also the story of L.A.'s contested racial space, with contradictions ranging from radicalized white youngsters in the suburban sprawl to Chicano Teamsters breaking strikes.\n-- Paul Buhle, Rain Taxi\nMonumental ... Set the Night on Fire is, above all, a historical account of how a rainbow of insurgent social movements tried to peel back the glitter, dismantle the police state, and replace elite white rule and its regimes of segregation, militarism, patriarc","brand":"smeikalbooks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40444425207893,"sku":"9781784780227N","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/a53d1236-9077-42c9-9601-5327973e43cc.jpg?v=1670414299","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/products\/set-the-night-on-fire-l-a-in-the-sixties","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}