Los Angeles holds an outsize place in the cultural imagination: a land of glamor and celebrity but also of dispossession. It is a city where nothing is hidden and yet nothing is faced head-on. The dream factory of Hollywood and the endless-summer sunshine, low-slung houses and highways belie the myriad exploitations of those who come to the city dreaming of discovery. The city has come to play, as Mike Davis put it in his 1990 historical meditation City of Quartz, “the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism” (18).
Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, coauthored by Davis and historian Jon Wiener, aims to shed light on the role of Los Angeles in the political and social uprisings of the 1960s. Many accounts of the decade (both popular and scholarly) focus primarily on the college towns of the Midwest, where Students for a...