Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
I feel like I know a lot about our city's history, but there was so much information here that was new to me. Covering San Francisco from the 1960s (when everybody partied) through the 1980s (when everybody died -- while then-president Reagan twiddled his thumbs), this book was a fascinating narrative of key events like the "Summer of Love," the Zebra killings, Jonestown, the Patti Hearst kidnapping, and the Milk/Moscone assassinations. The author puts the history into context so that the reader really gets a sense of what it was like to live in the Bay Area during this time. There are a couple of chapters about sports teams near the end, but you won't miss anything by skipping them. A worthwhile read for any San Franciscan.
This book is simultaneously really good and really frustrating. Good because it covers a lot of ground, and gives you a decent high-level sense of what was happening to the city in an important two-decade period. And it is mostly fairly entertaining. It is bad because the coverage is anecdotal and personality-driven. There is no data; no economics; no sociology except of the most two-bit, BS kind.
As an example, the book goes into some depth on the people behind two politically/racially-motivated killing sprees of the 70s. In passing, the book mentions that SF had mostly been spared the urban riots that had riven a lot of the rest of the country. Also in passing, while hearing stories about music and the Fillmore, you learn that the Western Addition, where most of the city's African-American population lived, was basically destroyed by urban renewal. If you want to read a novel …
This book is simultaneously really good and really frustrating. Good because it covers a lot of ground, and gives you a decent high-level sense of what was happening to the city in an important two-decade period. And it is mostly fairly entertaining. It is bad because the coverage is anecdotal and personality-driven. There is no data; no economics; no sociology except of the most two-bit, BS kind.
As an example, the book goes into some depth on the people behind two politically/racially-motivated killing sprees of the 70s. In passing, the book mentions that SF had mostly been spared the urban riots that had riven a lot of the rest of the country. Also in passing, while hearing stories about music and the Fillmore, you learn that the Western Addition, where most of the city's African-American population lived, was basically destroyed by urban renewal. If you want to read a novel of personalities, the book's approach to these killing sprees is fine. If you actually want to learn about San Francisco, the priorities are all wrong. The people involved are pretty now all dead or in jail - knowing about them is titillating but tells you nothing about the current city. The long-term dynamics (history, economics, etc.) that he book tells you nothing about are still very much with us, and the book tells you basically nothing about them.
I'd still really love to find a good history of the Summer of Love and the 80s in the city, but this is not it. (For the 70s, Randy Shilts' Milk biography is really pretty great - despite being focused on Milk, and I'm sure leaving a lot out, it still manages to tell you much more about the deep political and economic issues facing the city than this book does.)
