Synopses & Reviews
An epic account of how middle-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, this wide-ranging cultural and political history rewrites the 1970s as the crucial, pivotal era of our time. Jefferson Cowies edgy and incisive bookpart political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American musical, film, and TV loremakes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from New Deal America (with its large, optimistic middle class) to the widening economic inequalities, poverty, and dampened expectations of the 1980s and into the present.
Stayin Alive takes us from the factory floors of Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie also connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. Cowie makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of George McGovern campaign; radicalism and the blue-collar backlash; the earthy twang of Merle Haggards country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever. Like Jeff Perlsteins acclaimed Nixonland, Stayin Alive moves beyond conventional understandings of the period and brilliantly plumbs it for insights into our current way of life.
Review
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 postbaby boomer 70s scholarship and churns them into the first compelling, coherent statement Ive read of what happened in the '70s
Cowie's accomplishment is to convey what this epic cheat felt like from the inside.”Rick Perlstein,
The NationIf you want to understand how we got herehow the Democrats New Deal coalition shattered in the 1970s, and why progressives are still picking the shrapnel out of their political hidesyou must read Stayin' Alive. A fun read with cultural insight
Cowie is impossibly fair.”Joan Walsh, Salon.com
Synopsis
Winner of the 2011 Merle Curti award, an epic account that recasts the 1970s as the key turning point in modern U.S. history, from the renowned historian A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin' Alive is prizewinning historian Jefferson Cowie's remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book--part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and television lore--Cowie, with "an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America's fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.
About the Author
Jefferson Cowie is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCAs Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (The New Press), which received the Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History for 2000, and a co-editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. He lives in Ithaca, New York.