Together, Davis and Wiener have crafted a book that is both encyclopedic and prophetic, scholarly and polemical. Irvine and host of the podcast “Start Making Sense,” has written recently about our collective historical amnesia surrounding the Cold War, and there is clearly a similar call in this work to remember the witness of the radicals and other “working class heroes” that inhabit the pages of Set the Night on Fire. Jon Wiener, an emeritus professor of history at U.C. Dick, the Los Angeles-based writer who is most remembered for his dystopian visions of the city in the film “Blade Runner” (1982), were also clear inspirations. This was clearly no accident, as two of Davis’s subjects, Carey McWilliams, the leftist author of several works of Southern California history, and Philip K.
City of Quartz, Mike Davis’s classic (if unclassifiable) history of Los Angeles, first published three decades ago, reads like social history filtered through the febrile imagination of a sci-fi novelist.
Readers would be hard-pressed to find better guides for a tour of leftist Los Angeles. Instead of watering holes and and the Playboy Mansion, our guides to the city take us to college campuses at the height of the antiwar movement, to the streets of Watts on the brink of uprising, and to the churches and meeting halls where the fight for gay rights began. Where Tarantino’s film represents an elegy for the passing of an older, more conservative version of Los Angeles, Davis and Wiener see in the same decade a promise to be fulfilled. In propulsive prose and vivid historical vignettes, Davis and Wiener narrate a near-mythic history of radical Los Angeles, a movement that they contend planted the seeds for an as-yet-unrealized revolution. But instead of watering holes and and the Playboy Mansion, our guides to the city take us to college campuses at the height of the antiwar movement, to the streets of Watts on the brink of uprising, and to the churches and meeting halls where the fight for gay rights began. in the Sixties, similarly takes readers on a picaresque voyage around Los Angeles during the “long sixties” (1960-1973).
The new book by the historians Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
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