"A Kind of Patchouli-Scented Version of Florence During the Renaissance"

"But this book is more interested in how politics and Hollywood ricocheted off each other. One chapter considers Jane Fonda and her left-wing political awakening during her marriage to the activist Tom Hayden. The earthquake they wanted to set off in Washington never came, while in the cultural realm, as Brownstein chronicles, America convulsed with change. More permissive attitudes about sex and drugs, a perception that the American dream was not only unattainable but rotten at the core—this new sensibility charged up the films, music and television that Los Angeles exported to the rest of the country, and the world."

Madeleine Brand at The New York Times reviews Ronald Brownstein's Rock Me on the Water: 1974 The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics.