As the title suggests, Lincoln A. Mitchell's San Francisco Year Zero aims to take readers back to the year in which the seeds of today's San Francisco – marked by tech wealth and income inequality – were planted in the soil of political violence, punk rock and a promising baseball team. But what seems like a potentially insightful and fresh examination of San Francisco's political culture turns out to be more of a rehashing of the notorious events that rocked the city in 1978 – the Jonestown massacre and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by recently resigned supervisor Dan White – interwoven with tales of the author's twin passions, punk rock (also mostly a rehash) and San Francisco Giants baseball.

Mitchell is a political scientist with expertise in American foreign policy, particularly with regard to the former Soviet states, as well as a baseball scholar, which means that the most original parts of the book deal with the Giants. In those sections, the author's enthusiasm for the game and the team come through, both in the minute detail in which he reports statistics that only a hardcore fan will understand, but in making us care about a baseball season in which the Giants finish, after all, only in third place. Here, the mix of the author's own memories of going to games as an 11-year-old with his scholarly reflections on the team's 1978 season pay off.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not hold together in the way the author seems to want it to. For one thing, he does not engage urban theory or even urban history much at all, even as the promise of the book is to help us understand how San Francisco became the archetypal neoliberal city. An epilogue of sorts discusses Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who succeeded Moscone, and her pro-business legacy but delves no further into the structural forces that have facilitated the city's shocking homelessness problem (the origins of which certainly date to the 1970s). In fact, the question of housing gets almost no mention, despite the epic battles between tenants, landlords and the city in the late 1970s – and the fact that punks, at least, protested this pattern of dispossession at the time. Indeed, the author does not engage with theories of subcultures or subcultural resistance to neoliberal economic policy at all, favouring instead familiar tales from the city's punk scene.

Rather, the author seems more interested in writing an accessible history of one crazy year in the city's life, like Jonathan Mahler's Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (2005). Mahler had the advantage, however, of a New York Yankees team that was every bit as volatile and colourful as the city it represented in the Summer of Sam. In that same year that blackouts and looting rocked the city, and CBGBs and Studio 54 defined New York culture, the dysfunctional Yankees did better than land in third place: they won the World Series.

Mitchell's largely chronological approach makes it hard to sustain a similarly compelling narrative arc. The climactic events in San Francisco's 1978 – Jonestown and the assassinations – take place in late November, long after the Giants’ season ended. Much of the book, therefore, covers the first 10 months of the year by alternating between providing context on the Moscone political era, the rise of Milk as the nation's most prominent gay politician, Jim Jones moving the People's Temple to the jungle in Guyana, the rise of punk and too much detail on the Giants’ promising start. In telling the political and punk stories, Mitchell simply follows the work of others. Although he conducted interviews with a number of figures from the political and punk scenes, these interviewees mostly say the same things they have said in other interviews about the same subjects.

One wishes that Mitchell had either written a memoir of his youth in late 1970s San Francisco (because the scenes he paints of going to ball games with his brother or seeing Dan White's wife working the French Fries stand at Pier 39 or learning of the assassinations in his sixth grade classroom are among the best of the book), or that he had expanded his analysis into 1979 – he could have coined the term ‘San Francisco's long 1978’ – in which he followed the story of politics, punk and baseball through the spring and summer of the following year. That would have given him more space to deal with Dan White's trial, the riots that followed the verdict, the rise of Dead Kennedys and the mayoral campaign – all of which get only passing mention at the end of the current book, but are arguably as important as the events of calendar year 1978 in determining San Francisco's future. The only problem, of course, is that in 1979, the Giants finished in fourth place.