Werbe, P: Summer on Fire

The temperature is scorching in Detroit during the summer of 1967 and so is everything happening in this fictionalized memoir by a staff member of the long-running Fifth Estate magazine. The characters are thrust into tumultuous episodes of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, anti-war demonstrations, fighting fascists, rock and roll at the Grande Ballroom, drugs, anarchism, the White Panther Party, Wilhelm Reich, and a bomb plot that provide "a people's history and radical folklore of Detroit." The setting is seven weeks in a critical year that demands ethical choices by all involved, ones which mirror today's crises.