Hello friends welcome to another episode of the vast majority I'm Jack

Vend deputy editor Micah Eutricht. One of the best books that I have read this year is Set the Night on Fire, LA in the 60s by Mike

Davis and John Wiener.

It's a chronicle of all of the upsurges of the 60s and early 70s in Los Angeles, everything from the anti-war movement

to the civil rights movement to feminist movement to stuff you don't normally hear about when talking about the

60s like the teeny bopper riots on the Sunset Strip in LA. It's this giant tapestry of a city in upheaval at a time of

upheaval and at a time when things are pretty bleak, I read this book over the summer at the height of the protests against the murder of George Floyd, and reading this book doesn't make you feel like contemporary history is going to have a

happy ending by any stretch of the imagination.

But it does, strangely, give you a sense of hope and of optimism. I mean not because every

battle that is being fought by the left today is going to be successful

certainly not because the majority of the battles fought in the 60s in L.A. or anywhere else were successful because they weren't.

But because there is a long tradition going back decades and centuries of average people being able to rise up and

to be able to fight against the forces of oppression and exploitation that run our society and

readings set the night on fire you feel like you're a part of those

currents and you get the strange sense, even despite defeat after defeat, that we might actually be able to bring some victories out once in a while and make the world a more humane and just and pleasant place to live. So I can't recommend this book

enough set the night on fire LA in the 60s published by Verso Books earlier this year. Here's my conversation with John Wiener.

John is a contributing editor at The Nation magazine. He's host and producer of their

excellent podcast Start Making Sense.

He's an Emeritus Professor of U.S. History at the University of California at Irvine,

and has written a number of books,

including Gimme Some Truth, the John Lennon FBI files,

and how we forgot the Cold War.

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