Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love Author: David Talbot | Language: English | ISBN:
B005C6FDFY | Format: PDF
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love Description
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
- File Size: 16117 KB
- Print Length: 482 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1469204061
- Publisher: Free Press; Reprint edition (May 8, 2012)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005C6FDFY
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,765 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #5
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > West - #32
in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Social History - #51
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > 20th Century
- #5
in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > West - #32
in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Social History - #51
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > 20th Century
The book is well written, informative, and entertaining. But it is a strange exercise to read, written by someone with a great deal of information and skill but oddly lacking in a native grounding here. The result is a story told with great facility, but flawed in its biased and incomplete perspective and rather frequent lapses in accuracy.
As a native San Francisco Irish-American Catholic of several generations who came of age here in the era he describes, I find that the book takes a lot of liberties and leaves some unfortunate residues. He feels pretty free to slam Irish Catholic San Francisco, a community great in number with roots in the community that precede the Gold Rush. He even uses an ethnic slur: "Mick" in one passage - certainly you would not feel emboldened to present this kind of bias against any other religious or ethnic group in a mainstream non-fiction book release. (It seems that open ethnic and religious bias is quite OK in progressive circles if you are on the 'right' side of the struggle.)
This odd anti-Catholic, sort of love-hate vis the Irish, bias pervades the book. I think that the author found that he could easily portray old school working class San Francisco in a manner of stereotyping by simply calling the old establishment 'the Irish Catholics' (who certainly had power but never 'owned' the City) without having to do a whole lot of challenging research. He can't bring himself to say something nice about beautiful Sts. Peter & Paul's in North Beach without pairing it with a nasty criticism. This beloved church is one among dozens in the City that nurtured and educated hundreds of happy, well-adjusted people for whom the parish was the vital center of the community.
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love Preview
Link
Please Wait...