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Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days Of Paranoia (2010)

by Francis Wheen(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1586488457 (ISBN13: 9781586488451)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

PublicAffairs

review 1: I wasn't that charmed by the style of this book (I'm not into journalistic styled histories) and I felt the chapter on the Soviet Union was weak in parts with too much reliance on emigres' information and with most of the works cited in the notes having been published before 1991.However Wheen's central thesis of the seventies as the paranoid decade which in some ways we're still living in is solid and well argued. And unlike a lot of books written on recent history, it also remembers that it's distant enough in the past now that there will be readers who were too young to remember or weren't alive in the seventies.
review 2: This is an interesting, if somewhat uneven, book. It looks at the 1970s with the purpose of demonstrating that it was a weird and wild, e... morextremely paranoid decade. I wasn't alive in the '70s, so I can't say how accurate Wheen's description is. However, I can say, that, being of a younger generation, I felt like a lot of his points went over my head. He spends a lot of time recollecting his specific experiences and expecting the reader to remember, too, which severely limits his audience. The book isn't constructed in any sort of linear fashion, so if you're expecting a straightforward, timeline style history, you're out of luck. There are some interesting parts, especially the bits about Nixon, Mao, and various dictators. A lot of time is spent on the UK's situation, which makes sense as Wheen is British, but a lot of the minutiae of British politics can be lost on the American reader (at least if the American reader is me). The germ of Wheen's idea (that the paranoia of the '70s lingers today) is interesting, as are a lot of the stories that are brought up as asides. But the book is a bit of a mess and doesn't live up to its potential. I am glad, though, that I read it right before David Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Four, because otherwise I would have missed a lot of the time period. I can't really recommend this book overall. less

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