The Seventies - Softcover

Newsday reporter Edelstein ( The Pop '60s: A Personal and Irreverent Guide ) and McDonough, a sales manager for Pharos Books, take us on a tour of '70s popular culture, giving a quick fix on significant trends in cinema, rock and roll, fashion, television and politics from that hurriedly forgotten decade. Their thesis is that the '70s really changed people's daily lives with the coming to fruition of such movements as feminism and gay liberation. This so-called revisionist overview is refreshingly biased but decidedly frothy. The authors' notions of high and low culture, liberal and conservative, have been contrived to appeal to middle-brow, middle-class tastes. Woody Allen is applauded for his early slapstick movies, such as Bananas , and denigrated for films, most notably Manhattan , in which g he satirizes the literati. On the political front, Gerald Ford comes across as both a likable buffoon and underrated president, while George McGovern is a "symbol of leftist elitism." While leaving nostalgic yearnings in its wake, the book unintentionally more supports than dispels the notion that the zeitgeist of the '70s was merely a postscript to the '60s and a prelude to the '80s. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Substantial histories of the Sixties appear with regularity, e.g., Lauren Kessler's After All These Years ( LJ 5/15/90) and John Whalen and Richard Flacks's Beyond the Barricades ( LJ 9/15/89). Regrettably, the Seventies lack the Sturm und Drang of the Sixties, although Edelstein and McDonough argue here that the Seventies "revolutionized everyday life" in such areas as the environment, consumerism, and women's rights. Most of their book, however, is devoted to superficial and/or cutesy observations about films, TV programs, fads, and other relatively trivial matters of the decade. Only for readers who get nostalgic for macrame, the energy crisis, Deep Throat (the porn film or the anonymous source that helped do in Nixon), and Carly Simon singing "You're So Vain."-- Kenneth F. Kister, Tampa, Fla.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.