- Hardcover: 469 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press (Oct 28 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0520083105
- ISBN-13: 978-0520083103
- Product Dimensions: 2.4 x 1.6 x 0.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 880 g
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,388,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Library Journal
Henriksen (history, Univ. of Hawaii) has written a savvy study of the transformation of American mass culture in the 1950s and 1960s. She focuses here on the domestic consequences of the atomic bomb and the shift from a culture of anxiety to one of rebellion. Her narrative moves from war studies to teenage delinquency and mental illness to film commentary and back again, with impressive agility. One of the book's best features is its understated, uncomplicated prose, which should make it accessible to a general audience. Another is its emphasis on "coarser" forms of popular culture. Henriksen writes, "It was in particular the new cultural products and genres?film noir and roman noir, science fiction films, pulp crime literature, beat poetry, rock'n'roll, and black humor?that illustrated the revolutionary and explosive cultural impact of the atomic bomb." She goes on to analyze these forms with considerable insight, applying her specific critiques to her larger argument. Recommended for academic cultural studies collections and larger public libraries.?Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A historian bites off more than she can chew in this look at America in the shadow of the bomb from Los Alamos to the early 1970s. Henriksen (History/Univ. of Hawaii) attempts to show how America's obsession with the atomic bomb produced a ``culture of dissent'' that affected most kinds of artistic expression. Although several forms of art are addressed (popular music, including such hits as Barry McGuire's ``Eve of Destruction''; the visual arts, as represented by such figures as Jackson Pollock; the novel, as in the works of Thomas Pynchon), film is the primary medium with which Henriksen concerns herself. She examines films that explore a variety of themes, including chemical destruction (White Heat), youth in revolt (Rebel Without a Cause), and, of course, the bomb itself, most notably in the film of the book's title. But it is the work of Alfred Hitchcock that weighs most heavily in her analysis; his film Psycho figures, for instance, in a chapter on the rise of mental illness in America during the postwar period, while Vertigo expresses the pervasive guilt and confusion of the era. Indeed, the narrative often seems bogged down by extraneous material, by a proliferation of examples incompletely explored. Furthermore, while the study is clearly defined as cultural history, there is far too little actual history to hold the book coherently together. The most important historical event in postwar America relating directly to the atomic bomb--the Cuban missile crisis--is disposed of by Henriksen in a mere five pages. Henriksen really seems to have two books in one: the first about Hitchcock and post-war America, the other about the ``culture of dissent'' as expressed in the arts of the last five decades. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
TV's "Mister Ed" as a Cold War Rorschach test?,
By Excerpt from "The Independent Review" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Hardcover)
Deprived of its logically impoverished arguments, its lead-footed marches around the evidence, its deadening repetitions, its portentous clichés, its merciless summaries of fourth-rate works of art, and its tributes to such world-historical happenings as Woodstock, James Dean, John Lennon's "Imagine," and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (the only political song that manages to be dumber than "Imagine"), Henriksen's book would be a great deal shorter than its current 475 pages. The obvious advice would have been to remove all the aforementioned stuff and replace it with material that even politically sympathetic readers should expect to see: a careful analysis of the way in which popular culture is produced and consumed, a really critical review of the assumptions and evidence behind both left- and right-wing political ideas, and a thorough investigation of the variety of means by which "cultures" are influenced by the modern state, with special attention to little matters like taxation and conscription.
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Classic,
By W. Watson - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Hardcover)
I needed this for an undergrad class on nuclear weapons ... Ordered it used and it was in good shap and shipped quickly.
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