The Great Funk: Styles of the Shaggy, Sexy, Shameless 1970s

Toward the end of Thomas Hine's terrific new book, "The Great Funk", he reminds us that even after 225 pages of historical remembrances about the Seventies, this was a truly awful decade. For those of us who came of age then, Hine's offering is a cheerful, if whimsical look back...for others who were not alive at the time, this may be the best (and only) chance to get to know it. "The Great Funk" is such a pleasure to read because it has a Seventies' "look" about it. Stylized with photos that have no uniformed place, this is a book mostly about culture. The "funk" part certainly involved our leaders at the time who gave us no hope or inspiration....the conniving Richard Nixon, the likeable but ineffectual Gerald Ford and the negative, pessimistic Jimmy Carter. No wonder Hine marks the end of the decade with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in early 1981. While it can be said that the decade was an outgrowth of the Sixties and led in some ways into the mechanized Eighties, the Seventies was a time that's hard to pigeonhole or even characterize as much more than a mishmash of clashing culture. And yet, through it all, the author has captured whatever essence those years had with a distinct clarity. I highly recommend "The Great Funk"...it may just cheer you into reality.

I thought I knew something about the 1970s, but I was wrong--reading The Great Funk made me realize how much I was missing, and it was a lot! Hine's book brings it all to life--and the illustrations are fabulous! Where did he find them? A really significant contribution to the cultural history of the USA, but also wildly enjoyable! Rob Iorillo Sonoma, California

What Hine did for the 50's in Populuxe, he's now done for the 70's. I lived thorugh the 70's but never before realized how much that era has affected our lives today. The book is a fascinating blend of design and social history, and Hine ties all the disparate odds and ends togther. Before, I saw only the pieces - he shows us the whole. The Great Funk is a very serious document of an era, yet I laughed all the way through. Hine makes us remember things we paid no attention to then, and have long since forgotten, and makes it all make sense. Hine is famous as an astute design critic, but he is also a social historian with a rare sensitivity and a keen nose for nuances. The amazing part is that he writes it all with a sense of humor and sly grin, and turns a serious subject into a page-turner. If you were born after the 70's,you will see your parents through a new lens and begin to understand why their house is filled with too many plants, flea market finds and why dad still wears his Mexican poncho. Just don't ask if they ever went to Plato's Retreat. I couldn't put this book down. The Great Funk, along with Populuxe will be a great gift for those who lived through those times and those who wish they had.

A few nights before I left Hong Kong for Chicago to pursue my graduate work in 1971, I dreamt of vampires coming at me in the streets of America. I didn't find any vampires. I "found" myself and my fellow baby boomers instead. I lived through the pain and the exhilaration of the Great Funk years, when "conventionality belongs to yesterday" (as the disco song goes in the 1978 movie `Grease'). I got angry at my roommate for smoking pot with his friends in my room (I didn't know that they were just having fun). I saw students on campus streaking across the Quadrangle in Ann Arbor. They stopped only after the president of the university had streaked himself. He killed the joy. I wore checkered white-and-green bell bottoms from Filene's basement. I bought my first car in 1978, a used off-white and green "Heavy Chevy" when I got my first job in Cortland, New York. The salesman told me that the previous owner was a widow who used the car only to go to church. Toward the end of the decade, I saved enough money to buy a grey shag rug to decorate my one-room apartment in Astoria, Queens. The shag rule was so hairy--and I thought it was so sexy--it could not be cleaned. Mr. Hine's book, The Great Funk, resurrects the sights, sounds, smells and emotional tumults of America in the 70s. America in the Seventies was, as Mr. Hine said in the book's title, "falling apart." It was an intensely lonely and bewildering period. But the same feeling of not believing in the establishment -- or not having an "anchor" -- also allowed people to "come together" to find their own meaning and do their own thing. That was how I came to find myself. One chapter in the book, "Night in Green Dacron," made me cry. Never again could I sit with thousands of young college students watching "Behind the Green Door" with no sense of shame. We outsourced hypocrisy in the 70s. Everything hangs out. America in the Seventies had a place for people who dared to be themselves -- to be a working mom, to be gay, to have hair, to be black, or to be funky. The Great Funk years in America showed me that I didn't need to hide or to lie. Mr. Hine's book tells why.