Synopsis
This first collection of writings to fully represent and analyze the 1980s features contributions by more than 30 writers, including Christopher Lasch, Eric Bogosian, and Hilton Kramer, who had enormous influence on the politics and culture of the time.
Reviews
Gathering articles and book excepts by the likes of Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and P.J. O'Rourke, Sewall, an authority on school curricula and textbooks at the Center for Education Studies, assembles an ultraconservative primer on an ultraconservative era. For those who would rather not remember what they were doing during the '80s, these essays are reminder about the era of yuppies, conspicuous consumption, Drexel Burnham, identity politics, cultural neoconservatism, etc. Opening with late '70s cultural critiques by Christopher Lasch (from The Culture of Narcissism) and Ben Stein (from The View from Sunset Boulevard), the anthology has little specific to say about the social corollaries of, for instance, the New Right's politics, Reaganomics, the drug wars, or the beginning of the end of the Cold War--much less about MTV or Madonna. Instead, Sewall focuses mainly on the culture wars, academic debates over the canon, and the resurgent concept of virtue, offering pieces by E.D. Hirsch Jr., Christiana Hoff Summers, and others. Articles from the New York Times about the early diagnosis of AIDS, subway panhandlers, and Limelight, the Manhattan church-turned-disco, provide some color, along with lighter, satirical pieces by Eric Bogosian on how to pitch a sitcom and by Tom Wolfe on quasi-religious culture vultures. The liberal perspective is (meagerly) represented by a few self-critical editorials from the New Republic. Racial matters are touched on by Richard Rodriguez and Shelby Steele. Many selections (Irving Kristol on the intelligentsia's discontent with America and Western civilization; Louis Menand on critical legal studies; Hilton Kramer on the death of Andy Warhol) make the '80s seem mostly like a delayed reaction to the '60s. The '80s may be history, but Sewall's The Eighties tells only a part of that history. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
For the postmodern wary, this work, edited by Sewall (Dream Republic, Addison, 1997), presents splendid essayists known for their tongue-in-cheek writing on our age. Hilton Kramer (of New Criterion), James Q. Wilson (Moral Sense, LJ 7/93), and dozens of others are bull's-eye perfect. While the essays have appeared elsewhere, Gilbert has produced a fine epistemic chrestomathy of social, fiscal, cultural, and religious issues for moderates. Myron Magnet's essay on the money society is first-rate; Neil Postman's screed against automation is a perfect anodyne to the technology craze; and Alasdair MacIntyre's excerpt from his After Virtue (Univ. of Notre Dame, 1984) is as powerful as ever. Although equally as polemical as John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution (LJ 3/15/97), this collection exceeds it in accuracy and delicious vitriol. It will delight its friends while disquieting its enemies. For public and academic libraries.?Mark Y. Herring, Oklahoma Baptist Univ., Shawnee
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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