Salon.com Founder to Discuss New Book Friday at Copperfield's

Longtime Bay Area journalist and founder of Salon.com, David Talbot is coming to Petaluma this Friday, June 8 to promote this new book “The Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.”

In the book, Talbot captures San Francisco between 1967 and 1982, weaving a tale of a rapidly changing city that belies the common image of peaceful hippies with flowers in their hair.

Amazon.com writes:

Season of the Witch comes to life with jaw-dropping scenes and a cast of characters that includes the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, the Cockettes, the Hells Angels, Harvey Milk, and the mercurial 49ers coach Bill Walsh. It was with the help of the 49ers, a grab bag team of misfits who mirrored the city itself, that San Francisco gradually reclaimed its spirit.

Writing about the Peoples Temple, a multi-racial Fillmore church led by the charismatic Jim Jones, Talbot discusses how politicians including Harvey Milk, Mayor George Moscone and Willie Brown embraced the domineering pastor because they viewed him as a way to get votes from both Blacks and liberal Whites. Jones eventually moved his cult to Guyana where nearly 1,000 people died after drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid, being injected with the drug or shot.

Read excerpts from the book here

All in all, “The Season of the Witch” is about the messy and often violent roots of San Francisco in the '60s and 70s and the stories of as activists and dreamers seeking to create a different world.

David Talbot will discuss his new work at Copperfield’s Books, 140 Kentucky St. at 7pm Friday, June 8.