Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

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Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 · rating details · 335 ratings · 102 reviews

In a kaleidoscopic narrative, bestselling author David Talbot recounts the gripping story of San Francisco in the turbulent years between 1967 and 1982—and of the extraordinary men and women who led to the city’s ultimate rebirth and triumph.

Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city rad...more In a kaleidoscopic narrative, bestselling author David Talbot recounts the gripping story of San Francisco in the turbulent years between 1967 and 1982—and of the extraordinary men and women who led to the city’s ultimate rebirth and triumph.

Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself—and then revolutionized the world. The cool gray city of love was the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution. But by the early 1970s, San Francisco’s ecstatic experiment came crashing down from its starry heights. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots, and finally a terrifying sexual epidemic. No other city endured so many calamities in such a short time span.

David Talbot takes us deep into the riveting story of his city’s ascent, decline, and heroic recovery. He draws intimate portraits of San Francisco’s legendary demons and saviors: Charles Manson, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Bill Graham, Herb Caen, the Cockettes, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, Joe Montana and the Super Bowl 49ers. He reveals how the city emerged from the trials of this period with a new brand of “San Francisco values,” including gay marriage, medical marijuana, immigration sanctuary, universal health care, recycling, renewable energy, consumer safety, and a living wage mandate. Considered radical when they were first introduced, these ideas have become the bedrock of decent society in many parts of the country, and exemplify the ways that the city now inspires us toward a live-and-let-live tolerance, a shared sense of humanity, and an openness to change.

As a new generation of activists and dreamers seeks its own path to a more enlightened future, Season of the Witch—with its epic tale of the wild and bloody birth of San Francisco values—offers both inspiration and cautionary wisdom.(less)

Hardcover, 480 pages

Published May 8th 2012 by Free Press

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Apr 27, 2013 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Richard by: SFPL.org

Shelves: california, history, san-francisco

This is a sometimes heart-wrenching and sometimes ecstatic narrative of the dramatic era that brought San Francisco through some incredible times and changes.

I can't say it any better than this review: San Francisco’s Darkest Hours: The founder of Salon takes a fascinating tour of the Golden Gate City, 1967–82.

If you love San Francisco — or you're interested in rock 'n' roll, gay history, traumatic 70s racial politics, or even the 49ers football team, you'll probably find this book riveting.

If...more

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May 09, 2013 Christopher Enzi rated it 5 of 5 stars

WOW! This dazzling page turner tells much of the history of San Francisco during the time I've lived here. From 1966 in the ramp up to the Summer of Love through the Big Gay Immigration boom which brought me here in 1976 through drugs, politics, sex, cults, murders and scandals, this book gets to the heart of the matter.
When people hear that I lived here in the 1970s, before AIDS was on anyone's radar, their ears prick up as though they were about to hear a dirty joke. Sure, there were orgies an...more

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May 07, 2013 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: heart-of-darkness

Dante is often quoted (I paraphrase) as finding heaven the hardest to write of all the sections of his Divine Comedy. I wonder if the writer Talbot had similar difficulties on certain sections of this exuberant popular history of one of my favorite cities, San Francisco during the sixties and seventies. His writing about the utopian early hippie days and an attempt at redemption in an effective stint at mayor by Diane Feinstein and a good 49ers season (I did find the section on the city’s respon...more

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Apr 16, 2013 Ann rated it 3 of 5 stars

It wasn't always peace and love in San Francisco. Or actually - ever. The hot second of 'gentle people with flowers in their hair' quickly gave way to a myriad of social misery - overdoses, VD, abandoned children, racism, AIDS, murder, manslaughter, etc. The problem was the myth we sang about far outlasted the reality we experienced - I had completely forgotten about the connection between the Jim Jones' mass murders and the Moscone-Milk murders a week later, for example. The book reminds us of...more It wasn't always peace and love in San Francisco. Or actually - ever. The hot second of 'gentle people with flowers in their hair' quickly gave way to a myriad of social misery - overdoses, VD, abandoned children, racism, AIDS, murder, manslaughter, etc. The problem was the myth we sang about far outlasted the reality we experienced - I had completely forgotten about the connection between the Jim Jones' mass murders and the Moscone-Milk murders a week later, for example. The book reminds us of San Francisco's blue collar, conservative repressed-Catholic heritage - a group of folks who unsurprisingly had a hard time accepting the influx of hippies and gays flooding in on "Trans Love Airways."
The trouble I have with this book is that the author edits events tightly to fit his premise: the Summer of Love was overtaken by a decade or so of unspeakable evil until rescued by the soothing, nun-like leadership of Dianne Feinstein and the ebullience the 1981 49rs 28-27 win over the Dallas Cowboys. The wrap-up is a little too pat in my opinion, and of course San Francisco has continued to have highs and lows - Loma Prieta, dot com bubble and bust, homelessness, etc. You gotta end the book somewhere. I think Talbot must have been on deadline - he stirred up a great big witch's brew of a story and then leaves us with a shallow 'resolution.' But since this is not a novel no resolution is really necessary (or even possible?) San Francisco's history continues to be written, revised and reinvented.
The book was a page-turner, and reminded me once again that the 'good old days' are a complete fantasy. I can't finish without mentioning that Talbot gets his digs in on Ronald Reagan, a president who had lackluster ratings in office but whose myth has continued to grow as the American people forget his complete lack of leadership on AIDS, his early acceptance of racism, the impact of his economic policies on the poor, etc. It's way more comforting to hearken back to an America full of peace and love, and a kindly 'ol Gipper running the show.(less)

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Oct 24, 2012 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: california-history

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in San Francisco and California history, or anyone who lived through the 60's and 70's and considered themselves part of that generation of cultural and political rebels. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and was 13 years old in the summer of 1968. I went to the Haight Ashbury with a group of girlfriends, chaperoned by my father, who waited nearby. We thought we were so cool in our baggy jeans and tie dye shirts, but also felt the dangerous, down and...more

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Jun 17, 2012 Elderberrywine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: library

From the Summer of Love into the '70s, the very aptly named Season of the Witch for San Francisco (and if you remember these times, you're welcome for the earworm) was an unbelievably turbulent decade. From the serial killer Zodiac, and the much more horrifying racial Zebra murders, to the Patty Hearst/SLA killings and robberies, to the bombings credited to various subversive factions, to the rise of Jim Jones AKA Jonestown Massacre (who swung the election to George Moscone), to the assassinatio...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Sian Lile-Pastore rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, music-art-culture, history, ahh-these-are-my-favourites, five-star-books

lordy, this was bleak. it's about san francisco from the late 60s to the early 80s, so i was prepared for the murder of Moscone and Milk and the rise of AIDS, but I was not prepared for zebra killers, jim jones, patty hearst and all the deaths from hard drugs. I was relieved when i got to a couple of chapters on american football which i didn't really understand or care about, but was light relief from everything else. I was not looking forward to reading about AIDS either, but actually, it was...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Deb Wong rated it 5 of 5 stars

David Talbot covers San Francisco's most colorful characters and also its most disturbing headlines from the 1960s-80s in his book "Season of the Witch". As a 4th-generation native San Franciscan, I appreciated the author's chapters describing the often larger-than-life personalities, those movers-and-shakers that were a part of San Francisco's rich history.

I was also chilled to read the chapters concerning the violent and often bizarre crimes committed in the City by the Bay. These stories mad...more

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Dec 11, 2012 itpdx rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

A wonderful and moving history of The City from the Summer of Love to the AIDS epidemic. I lived or worked in San Francisco from 1971 to 1976 and Talbot has provided the context and completed the stories of what I experienced or heard about during that time. He continues the story so that I can understand the current character of San Francisco.
"Cities, like people, have souls. And they can be broken by terrible events, but they can also be healed."
A down-side for me is that Talbot does not use...more

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Apr 09, 2013 Jay Hinman rated it 1 of 5 stars

It was with much anticipation and excitement that I started former Salon.com editor David Talbot's 60s-70s-80s history of San Francisco, "SEASON OF THE WITCH", and with much disappointment and disgust that I slammed it down thirteen chapters later. No, I did not finish the book. I'd never get those hours back, and alas, neither will I get back the four or so hours I invested in those 13 chapters. I believe that I can successfully and accurately review the book anyway, and hopefully talk you out...more It was with much anticipation and excitement that I started former Salon.com editor David Talbot's 60s-70s-80s history of San Francisco, "SEASON OF THE WITCH", and with much disappointment and disgust that I slammed it down thirteen chapters later. No, I did not finish the book. I'd never get those hours back, and alas, neither will I get back the four or so hours I invested in those 13 chapters. I believe that I can successfully and accurately review the book anyway, and hopefully talk you out of any inclination you might have toward reading it. To wit:

1. It has some of the most cringe-worthy, unimaginative writing I've seen in years.

I knew in the back of my head that Talbot, for all the initiative and gusto he showed in founding the once-excellent SALON back in the 1990s, was the web magazine's primary weak link when it came to actual journalism. Left-wing and emphatically so to a fault, his screeds about Bush this, 9/11 that (not to mention a bizarro Kennedy assassination obsession) made Michael Moore look like Tom Brokaw. Yet his bozo rock-n-roll shorthand in this book is even worse. He actually writes about how, in the Haight Ashbury, "the idea of free medical service was blowin' in the wind" (I wish I was kidding), and he quotes numerous other hippie rock lyrics in the service of his horrifically purple prose. I just googled the SF Gate review of his book and they respectfully quoted a very representative line, about the murdered George Moscone and Harvey Milk:

"Both men gave their lives for this oasis of freedom," Talbot writes, "the city where no stranger was kept outside its golden gate."

That's a line the reviewer thought represented Talbot's writing style very well. I think so too.

2. Talbot has absolutely zero nuance, nor the ability to tell a complex tale.

In David Talbot's 1960s San Francisco, the world is strictly black and white. The hippies and the people that welcomed them were heroes; the city's Catholic "old guard" were intolerant, incompetent, racist, sexist pigs. Rock and roll, peace and love was all upside. Dissent against the warmed-over, likely half-baked, "Rolling Stone" popular history of liberated 60s San Francisco is nowhere to be found here. Everyone is cast into stereotypical roles: "socialites"; "free thinkers"; gruff, tough-talking cops; gritty newspapermen; earthy rock and rollers like Jerry Garcia; and so on. Talbot shows zero initiative in carving his own researched narrative through the tropes of the past, and instead relies on the sort of Summer of Love picture books I used to flip through as a dumb kid in the 1970s for his journalism. I know this book takes a "darker" turn later, after the part where I stopped reading, yet after such an awful first third, the thought of how badly he'd butcher the People's Temple and Patty Hearst stories was just too much for me to stomach.

3. He believes every bit of BS this city's been telling itself since 1967.

I've lived in San Francisco since 1989, and I love it here. The self-congratulatory mythology this city soaks in, however, is and has forever been totally nauseating. Talbot has bought it all hook, line and sinker. He repeatedly waxes rhapsodic about "the fog rolling across the hills" and about San Francisco's "liberated, anything-goes spirit", except he usually uses some trite rock lyric or metaphor to write it even worse than I just did. Anyway, who actually calls this place "the city of love"? No one except for stoned hippie journalists in 1967 did – no one. The last straw for me was Tablot's misty-eyed chapter on San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, "swinging with the hepcats at Tosca", nursing a highball, rapping with Ferlinghetti, stooping down to understand the hippies, wearing his fedora to jazz clubs blah blah blah. I couldn't believe the shorthand and the shortcuts this guy took in the service of telling what could have been an incredible tale. The popular thumbnail view of everything that's happened here, and everyone who did it, just happens to be Talbot's lazy method of describing it as well.

All my worst fears about a clunker of a book were realized in its first third, and then some. I'm writing this as a warning to any potential readers, so that you may be dissuaded from investing four hours of your own life into this complete exercise in futility. (less)

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May 27, 2012 judy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, non-fiction

It helps if you are old enough to remember the Summer of Love. Even better if you can recite Ginsberg's "Howl". Since I qualify for both, this book was absolutely stunning. This is a brief but riveting history of San Francisco between 1967 and 1982. No doubt you'll have heard something about many of the news stories but, unless you lived there or followed SF news meticulously, you won't understand the context. I kept finding myself surprised by how all the seemingly separate events were actually...more

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May 13, 2013 Mary rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: love-it

As a resident of San Francisco since 1976, I've seen a lot of changes come over this "cool, grey city of love" (as Herb Caen called it). Talbot's book is part history, part hagiography, part love song. He clearly loves this city, and it undoubtedly has its enchantments. The chapters on the infamous Jim Jones and the tragic horror of Peoples' Temple was eye-opening, and frankly, should put Willie Brown in a constant state of shame and regret. But there's where the hagiography comes in -- Brown an...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself—and then revolutionized the world. The cool gray city of love was the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution. But by the early 1970s, San Francisco’s ecstatic experiment came crashing down from its starry heights. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots, and finally a...more

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Jan 05, 2013 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is an outstanding book. It takes you far beyond Herb Caen's three dot journalism and Armistead Maupin's Tales (although both of those authors are worthy studies). The vibrancy of San Francisco, its eccentricity and colorful weirdos are all laid out here in compelling portraits and anecdotes. After tracing the old leftist heritage of the City by the Bay, the book focuses on the period between the Summer of Love in the Sixties, up through the Hearst kidnapping, the Moscone/Milk murdrs, the Jo...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Spiros rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: All San Franciscans

Shelves: california, citylights

"...It seems a lifetime, or at least a Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of the world. Whatever it meant...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars

Tells some fascinating stories about San Francisco during a very dramatic time in its history, from roughly 1967 to 1982, with some bits from both before and after. The first third was a little slow, but Talbot really gets into gear during the sections covering the Jonestown tragedies and the Milk/Moscone murders, and then the 1982 Super Bowl. The first stories seem a bit disconnected, but the people and cultures they involve come together later in the book. The summer-of-love stories are good t...more

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Jul 01, 2012 Diane rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is not one you cannot put down but that's because of the way it is organized more than any lack of interest it generates. The author is an unabashed fan of the city but he does not spare the reader from any of the sad/bad that also is so much a part of San Francisco history. Yet it is not only a history book.

Season of the Witch seems to develop with the city. The historical facts and people are brought to life, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes creepy, sometimes sad. A special plus is t...more

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Jul 31, 2012 Sam rated it 4 of 5 stars

As David Talbot tells it, SF in the mid-20th Century was under the political control of corrupt, conservative Irish Catholics, then, in the '60s & '70s, multi- & counter-cultural liberals took over. Talbot is an enthusiastic supporter of the liberal takeover, yet fills this book with horror, some of which is pretty hard to take -- I had to skip over the descriptions of torture and murder by the black racist 'Zebra' killers, for example. The sections are Enchantment, Terror and Deliveranc...more

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Aug 03, 2012 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excellent overview of San Francisco from the late 60s to the early 80s. It includes many of the major happenings, including Summer of Love, The Zebra Killings, The killings of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, Jim Jones, etc. So many problems, and so many issues with the police during the time written about.
I do wish some of the information would have been expanded upon even more, AIDs gets very little in the book, and it is interesting to see how many of the people mentioned end up dying because...more

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Jun 10, 2012 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book recommended itself to me because it is a history of San Francisco in the 20th century and written by Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and a longtime resident of the city by the bay. For a week, I was plunged into the darker side of a place I tend to romanticize, but I couldn’t put it down! This would be a good one to read on your ipad because you are going to end up googling all the people and events mentioned to see more pictures and get other points of view. Talbot even supplies a so...more

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May 24, 2012 Shane rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: social-movements, history

This is a must read if you want to know about the insanity of San Francisco between 1968 and the 80s. There is plenty for the left to be embarrassed about in this book, like how UC Berkeley students carried around posters depicting Patty Hearst as a radical SLA militant while they were keeping her hostage in a closet. Or the fact that Mayor George Moscone Harvey Milk, and Angela Davis were all big supporters of Jim Jones right up to the cool-aid in Jonestown. Or that the "heavy hippies" run drug...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Wayne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Thank you to my friend Terri Pilate for recommending this extremely engaging and brilliantly told non-fiction book about a short few decades of San Francisco history. It's a period between the 60's and 80's and one I thought I knew very well--having lived in the SF Bay Area for most of that time. I actually learned quite a lot I didn't know, and was able to understand that period of my life a whole lot better. If you remember Moscone, Milk, Bil Graham, Herb Cain, Patty Hearst, Janis Joplin, the...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Nancy by: Jane Petermeier

Shelves: 2012, non-fiction

Seriously ... San Francisco certainly has traveled through hell oh, two or three times before reaching the beauty and captivating nature of the current day city by the bay. The book started a little whatever for me ... 200 pages on drugs and sex got to be a bit redundant for me. Apparently, the slogan "this is brain on drugs" hadn't come to the limelight yet. Thankfully, the book moved along to death, murder, kidnapping, cults, corruption, politics, football, sexual orientation, health crisis' ....more

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Dec 09, 2012 Katina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I have a new hair stylist who I find delightful. He recommended this book, and now I want to pick his keen brain for more book suggestions. Looks like I'll be making more regular haircut appointments.

"Season of the Witch" is rather epic in scope, but it is well-paced, and kept me totally enthralled. For anyone interested in the tumult of the 1960s and anyone interested in SF history, this is a great place to get your feet wet and delve into the insanity. In fact, I'd suggest it to anyone who li...more

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Sep 15, 2012 Justin Sorbara-Hosker rated it 3 of 5 stars

Won’t blow you away with style, but well put together and researched. The amount of story in the subject he has chosen (and the time span he chose to cover) makes it surprising that this came in under 500 pages at all – which may be why he left out Zodiac, & the ’89 earthquake. Hippies, Patty Hearst, drugs, bikers, Altamont, racial tension, Jonestown, birth of gay rights, murder, politics - and more. Solid reporting and storytelling; probably essential reading for fans of this city.

PRO
-Rese...more Won’t blow you away with style, but well put together and researched. The amount of story in the subject he has chosen (and the time span he chose to cover) makes it surprising that this came in under 500 pages at all – which may be why he left out Zodiac, & the ’89 earthquake. Hippies, Patty Hearst, drugs, bikers, Altamont, racial tension, Jonestown, birth of gay rights, murder, politics - and more. Solid reporting and storytelling; probably essential reading for fans of this city.

PRO
-Research. This is a city I love, though I love it from afar, but there was lots I found out here I didn’t now, from more about the hippies and several other local subcultures, to the random (and savage) race based killings called the Zebra murders.
-Though the bulk of the book is criminal insanity, there is a lot of insider information on politics and history of the times he covers (and the times that formed the city)
-Although concludes on the birth of AIDS in SF, ends with a glimmer of hope: the AIDS crisis as influence for forming SF’s current, compassionate identity … which helps after the concluding section – Jonestown and the assassination of Milk and Moscone. Pretty slight glimmer that could have been expanded on, but still.

CON
-Cover, and a little less so, title. Why put Coppola’s North Beach building on the cover (in the dark), when so little of the book’s narrative even takes place in North Beach? And if you want North Beach on the cover, a stock photo of one of the sleazier areas? Couldn't be that hard to find ... should have been something in the Haight, or the Castro, or even City Hall.
-Though I did like it, almost a DNF at a couple of points. Or if not a DNF, a ‘put down for a while & read something a little lighter’. The cumulative effect of the section entitled ‘Terror,’ which could have also been called ‘Blood,’ gets to be quite a downer after a while. Occasionally a bit graphic, and veers into the standard (and exploitative) true crime book territory. It’s far from the “Let’s Take an Axe to Granny for her Double Wide,” but still.
-Understood the point of the section about the ‘49ers, but totally didn’t care. But that’s just me.
-A blurb from freaking Peter Coyote, who is clearly a friend, & quoted regularly in the book, is a little unnecessary.
-A sentence, every once in a while, that you wonder how it made it past any editor. Either jarringly awkward, insensitive, or just downright bad.
(less)

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Aug 19, 2012 sandy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

There are lots of interesting facts about the city, and the first section really inspires you and reminds me the multiple ways why I love San Francisco. The second section is a bit ghastly, but interesting to read about. I do feel it is written to be very flashy and glitzy, rather than substantive and analytical about why things happened the way they did or presented the complexities of the different issues. It is not a journal article, I know, but it could have been a bit more nuanced. I am sur...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Rich Wong rated it 5 of 5 stars

A fascinating read on the (recent) history of San Francisco, from the counterculture of the 60s to the present day. Despite living in the Bay Area most of my life, I never had a historical context to place many of the news events that flashed across over the years (from Moscone to Harvey Milk to Jim Jones to the impact of counter-convention culture as the seeds of the silicon valley revolution). Awesome. Interesting to pair this with The Barbary Coast which covers the 1800s Gold Rush era of San...more

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May 14, 2013 California rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: ALL

Recommended to California by: KRON 4 News

Wow! This book was a great read! It had me engaged, fear with terror and amazing deliverance!

This city that I love so much, makes me proud where San Franciscans did pull together in the midst of terror, tragedy and triumph! It's not just politics, but it is the people that live here who make SF. The working class, the Pac Heights, the Mission, the diversity is what makes SF amazing! We can't forget the wonderful San Francisco 49ers! They helped San Franciscans to believe change was on it's way...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Shannan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Talbot portrays a fascinating and a vivid story about the history of San Francisco from 1967 to 1982; a riveting story of the city's ascent, decline and heroic recovery. This period is of radical change for SF- from the conservative Irish and Italian Catholics who ran city hall and the SFPD to the transformation of the new San Francisco values. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots, and finally a terrifying AIDS epidemic...more

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Sep 06, 2012 Celeste Rousselot rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, my-written-reviews

Having grown up on The Peninsula south of The City and already admiring David Talbot's writing ability and choice of subject matter from both Salon.com and his other book, The Brothers, I knew as soon as I read a review of Season of the Witch that I had to get it, hardcover or no, and read it ASAP. Strange as it may seem, even though I lived and attended college within 30 miles of San Francisco, I really did not know much about what was going on up there. It seemed far away – I was young, I was...more Having grown up on The Peninsula south of The City and already admiring David Talbot's writing ability and choice of subject matter from both Salon.com and his other book, The Brothers, I knew as soon as I read a review of Season of the Witch that I had to get it, hardcover or no, and read it ASAP. Strange as it may seem, even though I lived and attended college within 30 miles of San Francisco, I really did not know much about what was going on up there. It seemed far away – I was young, I was studying, I was in love. I was, in other words, otherwise preoccupied. Now, years later, especially after reading this book, I realize I did not fully appreciate the proximity of the treasure that was San Francisco in those critical years from the 1960’s through the 80’s.

Talbot's rapid paced, journalistic style pulls the reader forward from the Summer of Love (1967) to the discovery of the first medication to obviate, at least partially, the symptoms of AIDS. The story begins with youth from around the nation pouring into the Haight and progresses through the drug scene, rock n' roll concerts in the Fillmore, the gay awakenings and first parades, Cockette performances, the pornographic film industry (Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat) promoted by the Mitchell Brothers, the corrupt Irish then Italian Old-Boy system in the SFPD and the ever bickering City Board of Supervisors. The story continues with the Black Panthers pushing back, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapping Patty Hearst, and the Black Muslims committing the Zebra murders. Mayor Alioto and his successor Moscone, one of the most socially liberal and personally wild mayors (He smoked weed and loved hanging out late at night, especially with Black prostitutes) ever to govern an American city, managed to keep a lid on the jostling masses and numerous interest groups, all churning and boiling within the tiny 7 square miles that is San Francisco.

Along with the gay activist Harvey Milk, Moscone brought an open, welcoming, The-Golden-Gate-is-Never-Closed spirit to San Francisco, but at the same time drove the conservative Catholic old guard crazy. During Moscone's and Milk's tenure Jim Jones and the People's Temple moved into San Francisco and slowly wormed their way into city affairs by providing services to the poor, mainly Black, citizens of the Tenderloin and Fillmore districts, by helping Moscone and Milk get elected, and by supporting their appointees and ideas. When Jones finally moved his cult out of The City to Guyana, he left a trail of terror and tears. As San Franciscans learned, at last, what horrors went on inside the Temple and during the fiery holocaust in Jonestown, they and their city fell into a deep, dark depression.

At about the same time, after gaining strongholds in other parts of the state and country, the radical right tried to muzzle San Francisco and its gay, violent, seedy, smarmy ways. But The City just could not be subdued. At the peak of the civil unrest, Moscone and Milk were murdered by an irate homophobic City Supervisor, Randy White. The specter of immediate retributive riots loomed large in the communal mind of gathering crowds of angry, dejected gays and their supporters. Though liberal, but not radically so, Dianne Feinstein, the then Head of the Board of Supervisors, picked up the reigns of leadership immediately after the murders, staved off the impending riots with humane words, and promised to save San Francisco’s cherished ideals and diversity. From that day and for several years more, Feinstein governed The City steadily through additional harsh times. When the AIDS epidemic reached unthinkable proportions, many in the rest of the nation came to believe that it was San Francisco’s fault. After all it was too open-minded and accepting of “evil” ways. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan couldn't even say the word "AIDS." At one point during Feinstein’s tenure, San Francisco spent more in a year on AIDS research and care than did the rest of the nation put together.

It's Talbot's proposition, that the give and take, love and hate, corruption and honesty, gay and straight, and enchantment and terror within The City during the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s culminated in it becoming once again true to its moniker: The City of Love. Shepherded by savvy caring leaders both political (beginning with Dianne Feinstein) and athletic (think Bill Walsh and the 49ers, a team that brought hope and smiles back to The City), San Francisco became once again a beacon of hope for those suffering under the continuing hardball politics of the radical right and other oppressive groups, nation- and worldwide.

Talbot says it better:
"By taking care of these suffering men (first victims of the AIDS epidemic) San Francisco became a united city. ‘(It) learned to behave like one organism, to fight against the disease,' observed Paul Volberding (a young oncology doctor who worked at the UCSF Medical Center). This was the true birth of San Francisco values. The plague burned down to the city's core, where one simple truth was revealed: we must take care of each other. No matter how sick or helpless or untouchable people are."

As my readers have probably already surmised, I highly recommend Season of the Witch to almost everyone, from native and transplanted San Franciscans and modern American history buffs to those who just plain want to have “an enjoyable read.”
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