The Nation: Perlstein's golden words on the polyester decade

Nearly lost at the end of a massive, witty, high speed tour in The Nation that must include a drive-by look at every book on the seventies written since the dawn of the new era, is Perlstein's take on Stayin' Alive. I'm humbled by it. After screeching through the historical landscape, he manages to pull the sticky tranny of his supercharged Hunter S. Thompson word machine out of overdrive and pull over for a minute to say simply: read the damn thing.

Here are the pull quotes:

"I've struggled so long trying to figure out a way to summarize Cowie's new book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, that I started worrying I was losing my critical mojo. I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature. Some books, however, are not easy to encapsulate. Often that means the author doesn't know what he or she is doing.
Other times, though—much more rarely—the summary is difficult because the work is so fresh, fertile and real that the only thing it resembles is itself...You just have to read it. It establishes its author as one our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience. It corrals all the generational energies coursing through the centrifuge of post–baby boomer '70s scholarship and churns them into the first compelling, coherent statement I've read of what happened in the '70s."

"The American Century was supposed to be a century; no one thought it would last only thirty-two years. Cowie's accomplishment is to convey what this epic cheat felt like from the inside. The fact that he is able to do so from the perspective of working people does no less than revivify the moribund genre of labor history."

Take the whole ride here: Perlstein, That Seventies Show | The Nation