Set the Night on Fire

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award.Jon Wiener is Host and Producer of Start Making Sense, the Nation’s weekly podcast. He is an Emeritus Professor of US history at UC Irvine, and his most recent book is How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America.

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. 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). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

A magisterial, kaleidoscopic, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the sixties.