This is exactly the type of non-fiction that I love best: illuminating and fast-paced. The book was especially useful in connecting the dots between events that I already knew about, and giving context for why certain people and events developed as they did. Highly recommend. ( )

This book wasn't the best written thing ever, but it was a page-turner. San Francisco was a crazy town. I bring this book up again and again in conversations and shock my friends with some of the shit that went down in the city (literally, in the same houses and blocks and neighborhoods that we live in and walk/bike down every day.) ( )

An interesting and well written history of social and political life during the mid 60's to early 8o's in San Francisco and the Bay area. I'd forgotten about a lot of the things covered in this book, and there were a lot of things in here I never knew in the first place. ( )

Talbot’s well written and insightful book provides an entertaining and enlightening look at the recent history of the city of San Francisco. From the 1950s and 1960s, when the city began to shape its identity as a haven for iconoclasts and “alternative” types through the turbulence of the 1970s to the both admirable and regrettable developments of the end of the twentieth century, Talbot’s critical eye reports on the good, the bad, and the very ugly.

Although the author eschews the temptation to romanticize San Francisco’s multidimensional history, he acknowledges all the best that the city has to offer as he portrays the struggles and hardships that many readers might not be aware of—for example, the racial divide that vexed the city for much of the 1970s and the uneasy political partnerships that existed between venerable liberal figures like Mayor George Moscone, Harvey Milk, and the Peoples Temple, Jim Jones’ suicide cult, which once held an eerie degree of political power in the city.

Talbot devotes large sections of the book to the SLA and its abduction of Patty Hearst, San Francisco’s evolution as the gay capital of the US (if not the world), the strange ordeal of the Peoples Temple, Dan White’s assassination of Moscone and Milk, Dianne Feinstein’s political ascension, and other bits of history both profound (the Zebra murders) and uplifting (the 49ers’ triumph as NFL champions).

Overall, a compelling examination of the city of San Francisco, and a must-read for anyone who lives there or who has ever been curious about the city’s unique appeal. ( )

We lived it and we’re still here. A fascinating history of a city torn by violence and plague that somehow comes out of it all stronger. San Francisco’s story from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, this book delves into the darker corners of our collective psyche. Though I was here for it, this book puts it all together and provides details I was unaware of prior to reading it. From the rise of a unique musical scene to the glimmerings of an insidious disease that would decimate the population, this is a chronicle that matters. ( )