Book Review: The Season of the Witch

      A best -selling history of the city of San Francisco?   How does this happen?  One stocks the story with some of the most bizarre events of the late 20th century in a city widely recognized around the world.  What happened in this one location in a short window of time is the stuff of novels.  The founder of Salon,  author David Talbot, wrote a captivating history of the '60's, the '70's, and the '80's of a city rent by a series of remarkable and bizarre events.  The best-selling author of Brothers, a book about the Kennedy brothers, looks at the players and politicians who were deeply involved during the time period.   It looks at events that were part of the Baby Boomers' phase of early maturity during and after the Vietnam War which began in 1965 and ended in 1975 and hung like a pall over all the events mentioned.
     Published in 2012, it became a bestseller on the NYT pages.
     Who were the principal characters involved in San Francisco's turbulent times of the late 2oth century?  The list is long and the names are not obscure or unfamiliar.   Let's start from the beginning:
     In the '60's, we have rock impresario Bill Graham, the man who was responsible for putting body into the 'new' music.   He organized rock concerts right in the heart of the City, in the Fillmore District, the heart of old jazz music and Black culture.   Close on his heels were the rock stars themselves:  Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Jerry Garcia, Paul Kantner, and John Fogerty.   Many bands were also unleashed during the time such as Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Moby Grape.
      Overlaid with the music scene was a political maelstrom of competing politics.  Joe Alioto, a native son, was elected mayor in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War and the year after the "Summer of Love" of 1967.  He was a brilliant lawyer and had the backing of most areas of the City, excepting the Haight/Ashbury where the hippies/druggies/transients/ and dreamers landed.
     Another lawyer from the Irish side of the City was Vincent Hallinan, as Irish as Joe was Italian.  He represented various labor groups and individuals who were responsible for labor unrest that rocked the City from the mid-20's to the late '30's, shutting down the waterfront in 1934.
     As the music scene degenerated into chaos and confusion,   groups that splintered from the chaos sought a new direction and new goals.  Enter the Black Panthers, an all Black group out of Oakland across the Bay.   Then there was the SLF, a more radical group(of a handful) of mindless thugs bent on rage and terror.
     Other Characters included future US Sen. Diane Feinstein; future mayor and Speaker of the California State Assembly Willie Brown, State Senator and future Mayor, native son George Moscone, and clergyman Cecil Williams of Glide memorial Church in the City's Tenderloin.
     The whole mess was crowned by the alleged Rev. Jim Jones who wormed his way into local politics with money and masses of voters for anybody willing to pay. This raving maniac suckered most of the City's leaders, eventually getting caught with his church going under.  he left the City for Guyana where his cult murdered over 900 innocents, including almost 300 children.  He had placed his henchmen in key positions in the City's administration and always had inside information, especially within the city attorney's office run by Joe Freitas, Jr.
     Other players included Patty Hearst and her father, Randolph Hearst.  Dan White, who assassinated Geo. Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.   Topping this all was the AIDS crisis of the early '80's.
     David Talbot did a remarkable job, highlighting a period than continues to resonate across the country.   Diane Feinstein is still a US Senator.