Davis told us he and Wiener wrote the book to inform young people about the hidden history of LA and the fatal mistakes made there by radical movements in the 1960s, in the hopes that today’s radicals might succeed where yesterday’s failed. One of the events that occurred before the uprising was this public hearing of a cop named Mike Hannon. And what’s interesting is in Seattle, nobody remembers that it had the most successful daily labor paper in the country. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. 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. Trump’s popularity ratings are still about 40 percent. Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener – review Children playing in rubble left in the wake of the Watts riots, Los Angeles, July 1966. And these policies all point in a very determined and clear direction, which is that there are probably a billion and a half people, maybe more, maybe 2 billion, in the informal working class who have simply been triaged already in advance. “The familiar, monochromatic picture of Los Angeles in the sixties—all Hollywood pop and Didion ennui—required a million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry to be ‘edited out of utopia,’ as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it. Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener review – the real LA in the 1960s Blue skies, palm trees... and a dark heart. It planted thousands of seeds that have grown over successive generations, producing wonderful young activists in two generations. Police still kill black and brown residents with appalling regularity. Socialists need to advocate that the entire essential infrastructure, which now includes all the social media, it includes Amazon and so on—we should have to take those businesses and socialize them. As the book explains, the cops were haunted by the radical specter of unsupervised teens getting together at night.) This idea, of course, never got off the ground. And it’s amazing to me that history sort of repeated itself anyway, even without people knowing about the precursors. These should be non-negotiable to me. There’s tremendous misunderstanding about the LA Panthers, but it has only really been written about and studied about in town. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. Set the Night on Fire is a sort of bequeathal from one generation of activists to another. Set the Night on Fire is an in-depth and complex look at the history that created the sprawling city of L.A. Evelle Younger, who was DA, issued 1,730 felony charges against some Black students in Northridge, following indictments against Sal Castro, who was one of the most admirable figures in LA history. He was an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality in Los Angeles. And you have to ask yourself: What decisive steps will Joe Biden take that will really refloat the economy? Real estate prices were then at rock bottom. So in that sense, the 1960s book is a bit of war game which you play, not for the sake of understanding history better, but for the sake of understanding our current situation. His latest, Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, co-authored with the journalist and historian Jon Wiener, focuses on a single decade, a transformative one for the city and for its authors, who as young men were active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. And that convinced me that writing a book about a movement history of the ’60s in LA would have an audience among younger people. LA was a launchpad for Black Power--where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation--and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of "Asian America" as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, center of California counterculture. Verso; Illustrated Edition (14 April 2020), Great history of 1960s LA but a better map of the neigbourhoods is needed, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 May 2020, Astounding accounts of LAPD and the crushing of the Black Panthers, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 May 2020. It should be obvious—and I must say I was critical of Occupy Wall Street in this sense, right from the beginning, this idea of the 1 percent. A magisterial, kaleidoscopic, riveting history of Los Angeles in the Sixties Histories of the US Sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. Trump has become the principal vector of coronavirus in this country, one might say even in the world, because of the way that others like Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines followed his example. Circles and Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics), Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. Assuming Biden wins in November, what do you think their reaction is going to be? They were doomed unless you can control land prices and land use. This is the approach Davis has been using in the twenty-first century, and it work--Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum, An indispensable portrait of an unexplored chapter in the history of American progressivism.--Publishers Weekly, Insightful and innovative ... Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is both a fierce political and cultural history and a geographic corrective.-- William Deverell, Alta, Authoritative and impressive ... Set the Night on Fire is an essential reference to L.A.'s rich history of civil unrest, with a hopeful undercurrent. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda's Wagon, and Planet of Slums. This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. | ISBN 9781784780234 His more than a dozen books, invariably as apocalyptic as they are brilliant, include analyses of colonial-era famines and of the global rise of slums, a history of car bombs, and a distressingly prescient account of the pandemic threat of avian flu. But the battle came too late, once the negotiators had surrendered that. And it was followed by an incredible statewide white backlash, which led to the repeal of California’s fair housing law in November 1964. You have to look at what’s happening with racial backlash and the industrial white working class. But the revelations about a gang there that awards points and membership based on brutality, or for that matter, the murder of civilians, should lead us to kind of a broader concept than just focusing as we always have on the LAPD. Alf Landon in 1936, at 37 percent of the vote. In 1964, James Baldwin would write: “There is not one step, one inch, no distance, morally or actually, between Birmingham [Alabama] and Los Angeles.”. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation—and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of ‘Asian America’ as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture.Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos).