Season of the witch Enchantment, terror, and deliverance in the City of Love

UPON seeing the subtitle appended to "Season of the Witch," the latest book by David Talbot, this reader went into a defensive crouch. She hoped it was merely something dreamed up by an overzealous publicist. Alas. One opens the book to find a detailed table of contents reprising the overheated words on the cover. There are three parts: "Enchantment," "Terror," "Deliverance." Also a list of hackneyed, sometimes dreadful chapter titles ("Dead Men Dancing," "Lucifer Rising," "Prophet of Doom," "Fire by Trial"). The one that will prove most unforgivable concerns a chapter on the racially charged, black-on-white "Zebra killings," in which 23 victims were murdered or wounded over the course of 179 days. Its title? A pun on a children's riddle: "Black and White and Red All Over." After climbing this cliff of bluster, the reader must survive an attack of skepticism brought on by the Author's Note just two pages later. Talbot, who founded the online magazine Salon, tells us he grew up in Los Angeles but got a kid's view of 1960s San Francisco while his father, an actor, appeared in long-running plays there. Determined to make San Francisco his home, Talbot went back in the 1970s looking for his "city of peace and love," only to find it "beset by grisly crime and political violence," from which it emerged to become "a beacon of enlightenment . . . for the entire world." It may seem unfair to pick on the book's front matter. But in this case it reveals deeper, more fundamental flaws in the narrative's ambitions, style and storytelling. Glibness, hyperbole, the writer's overfondness for what he may imagine is cleverness - these undermine what might have been a serious work describing an era. Still, there are pleasures to be had in "Season of the Witch." Talbot leads us through a set of events that shook his adopted city from the late 1960s to the early '80s. We are given accounts, for example, of hippie-kid runaways on acid going psychotic and getting caught in a "harrowing public health labyrinth" right out of a medieval tale. This is in the "Enchantment" section. In "Terror": The Hells Angels on a rampage at the Rolling Stones' concert at Altamont. The kidnapping of the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. The resurfacing of the Zodiac serial killer. The Zebra killings, in which a group of Black Muslims killed and dismembered whites across the city. The murders of George Moscone, San Francisco's mayor, and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man on the Board of Supervisors. Incomprehensibly lumped together in "Deliverance": The riots that followed when Moscone and Milk's murderer got off on manslaughter. The 49ers winning the Super Bowl. The AIDS epidemic. My advice: Try to throw off the smothering "parts" framework. Endure the speed-bump chapter titles. Overlook phrases like "the idea of free medical service was blowing in the wind." Enjoy such descriptions as Allen Ginsberg's being "a cross between holy man and Jewish mother." And over all you may be startled by the sheer density of events that took place in a city as compact as San Francisco, and within just 15 years. Talbot's strength is his ability to get political movers of the era to tell him what powerful insiders were up to. His "sources" section is heavy with the marquee names who ruled San Francisco for decades: Willie Brown, Art Agnos, Dianne Feinstein, and members of the Hearst, Hallinan and Alioto clans. The book is essentially a top-down look at the city. The story the sources tell is not always pretty. Talbot's connections add a terrifying dimension to the story of Jim Jones, the charismatic preacher who founded the Peoples Temple and led his mostly black parishioners to Guyana, where he induced over 900 of them, children included, to kill themselves. The horror of Guyana has been portrayed elsewhere. But Talbot sees the events from inside San Francisco's deeply corrupt justice system: Jones planted his legal adviser in the D.A.'s office. Nearly the entire political power structure - governor, mayor, supervisors, assemblymen - was in Jones's pocket. It seems that Moscone, who was elected mayor by a mere 4,443 votes, may have had the election stolen for him by Jones, who drove his flock from precinct to precinct to help them cast multiple ballots. Clearly, Talbot has a knack for penetrating subcultures. The leaders of the gay male community talk freely with him about their personal experiences. What stands out, then, are the political forces he chose to omit. For instance, the civil rights efforts of La Raza activists in the Mission District. And (baffling to this reader, who lived in the women's community during the 1970s) the actions of the women's movement and, in particular, the lesbian subculture. Talbot gets a perfect opening from Rose Pak, a force in Chinatown politics. He describes her as a poetry lover. She sees an ad for a reading in a private house in the Mission District. What she finds is a roomful of women in flannel shirts. And no men. She tells Talbot: "Lesbianism? I mean how would you do it? I had no clue." Irresistible to add: evidently neither does Talbot. It's been 30 years since this reader was annoyed at men, qua men, so she worked hard to give Talbot good excuses for his cultural blindness. Perhaps it's his "parts" framework keeping out the story. The women's community was roiling over race and class issues, but I guess it didn't roil enough to qualify for the "Terror" section. Then again, imagine if Talbot had applied his storytelling skills to describe the 1978 "Take Back the Night" march against rape and violent pornography. We hear a good deal from Margo St. James, a former prostitute working to legalize her profession. How about some nice narrative contrast showing a bunch of really angry women marching through St. James's Tenderloin turf? Another possibility: Maybe he thinks gay women weren't "beacons" for the nation. Alas, this excuse also fails. Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, longtime lovers who inspired thousands of young lesbians during the 1970s, became the first same-sex couple in America to get a marriage license and wed. Perhaps this story belongs in the part called "Deliverance"? And so we come to Part 3, where Talbot's imposed structure becomes truly bizarre. As noted earlier, events offering deliverance include riots, football and AIDS. Here we learn more about Dianne Feinstein, who became mayor after Moscone's death. Talbot portrays her, rightly, as a steadying hand. But then he somehow feels the need to describe the many ways she was humiliated for being too prim, recalling especially that Moscone had called her a "stiff bitch." Talbot ends with the AIDS crisis, which he says "brought out the best in San Francisco," making it "a model for the nation," the city evidently returning to its former status as some sort of beacon. But wait: this light unto the nation was not to shine for over 10 years of fear, anger and turmoil. Millions are still dying of AIDS. To use the wrenching battles that took place during the AIDS epidemic as evidence of a city's "deliverance" - well, this might be a good place to stop reading the book. Which will be fine. There are only two pages left, and Talbot ends his story by saying his heroes from the era "had tilted with God, and sometimes they had won." If he says so. Talbot's history of San Francisco includes hippies, murderers, prophets, devils and mighty political insiders. Ellen Ullman is the author, most recently, of the novel "By Blood."

The liberation of San Francisco came with a price. Talbot presents the tempestuous years, from 1967 to 1982, as a new-versus-old battle for the city's soul. In an extensive history bursting with details and larger-than-life personalities, Talbot champions the outsiders, a human carnival from hippies to drag queens to activists, against the authorities representing the old, mainly Catholic, establishment. The extensive cast of characters includes Janis Joplin, Patty Hearst, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and Bill Walsh. Talbot, who started the San Francisco-based web magazine Salon and previously wrote the bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007), presents gripping accounts of both crime sprees and football showdowns. Even people who were there might take away something new, and for others, the book offers a comprehensive introduction to the era. Talbot believes modern San Francisco values have changed the world, and he explores the crucible of the transformation, in all its hope, violence, and glory.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2010 Booklist

Late 1960s San Francisco faced an identity crisis: conservative Irish values clashed with the breed of homegrown liberalism that had begun to spread nationwide. Covering 15 fraught years (1967-1982), journalist Talbot (Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years) reveals a community so hell-bent on inclusion that it inadvertently embraced evil. Exhaustive research yields penetrating character studies: the Summer of Love unfolds as Janis Joplin rose in her feathery boa; Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl narrowly escaped drug-related arrest; and a sparkle-dusted transvestite named Hibiscus revived drag shows. Talbot incisively relates the atmosphere of service in the Haight, populated with intrepid lawyers who defended revolutionaries, open-minded physicians who treated local drug addicts, and liberal clergymen who embraced teen runaways. With the homecoming of Vietnam veterans and an influx of amphetamines, however, the music scene fades as the city faces an outbreak of violence. Into a revolution "launched with the grandest intentions" slips Charles Manson, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the bomb-wielding New World Liberation Front, and Jim Jones's Flavor Aid carnage. In a surprising ending, Talbot convincingly suggests that imperfect new mayor Dianne Feinstein resurrected the city's heart as it rallied around the 49ers. In exhilarating fashion, Talbot clears the rainbow mist and brings San Francisco into sharp focus. Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Salon founder and CEO Talbot (Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, 2007). "But if it's a valentine, it's a bloody valentine, filled with the raw truth as well as the glory about the city that has been my home for more than three decades now." More than a retread of beatnik and hippie years or a series of chapters on colorful characters (has any city boasted more than San Francisco?), the author encompasses the city's essence. He seeks to make sense of how San Francisco became a magnet for those who felt they didn't fit elsewhere, how it sparked the "Summer of Love," a race war, a murder of its mayor and his charismatic ally (in which the author finds the police department "deeply implicated"), radical bombings, a high-profile kidnapping and the most notorious mass suicide in human history (Jonestown, in exile from San Francisco, which the author says should more appropriately be considered a "slaughter"). Talbot loves his city deeply and knows it well, making the pieces of the puzzle fit together, letting the reader understand how a charismatic religious crackpot such as Jim Jones could wield such powerful political influence, how the Super Bowl victory of the San Francisco 49ers helped the city heal, how the conservative Italian Catholics who had long lived there wrestled with exotic newcomers for the soul of the city. "Cities, like people, have souls," he writes. "And they can be broken by terrible events, but they can also be healed." Though he's a little too enamored with "angel-headed hipsters" and "fairy dust," Talbot takes the reader much deeper than clich, exploring a San Francisco that tourists never discover.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.