In City of Quartz, Davis saw the class war he was writing about as “a continuation of the race war of the 1960s.” That race war is exactly what Davis and Wiener document in Set the Night on Fire. These bitter roots are hardly obscure in 2020, but CoQ came out two years before the Rodney King riots. He documents the historical bond between the LAPD, real estate moguls, and the Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times their collective vision of LA was a blend of mythmaking and militarization. Davis also turns his attention to the history of lives lived in Los Angeles. In the beginning of CoQ, Davis described the focus of that book as “the history of culture produced about Los Angeles.” And that is true for roughly two hundred pages of CoQ, as Davis reviews the work of California historians like Carey McWilliams (he approves) and “the European reconceptualization of the United States” carried out by Los Angeles transplants like Theodor Adorno (he’s torn). SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, written by Mike Davis in collaboration with historian Jon Wiener, is a kind of sequel to City of Quartz, the cultural analysis of Los Angeles Davis published in 1990.
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