Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right by Dominic Sandbrook

(Knopf, $35)

The decade of disco and the leisure suit damaged more than our pretensions to stylishness, said Chris Tucker in The Dallas Morning News. As British historian Dominic Sandbrook points out in his “entertaining yet substantial” history of 1970s America, the decade’s major troubles—Vietnam, Watergate, the oil shocks, inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis—sapped the nation of confidence in its own “exceptionalism.” Since no one over 35 needs to be reminded of that, of course, Sandbrook has put himself under great pressure “to tell his tale in arresting fashion.” Fortunately, “he does”—and puts a fairly fresh spin on the consequences, too.

Sandbrook’s central argument—that the 1970s were for the Right what the status-quo-toppling 1960s were for the Left—“would have seemed like heresy” in 1977, said Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe. The era that began with the resignation of a Republican president and found women and minorities enjoying “a greater degree of social freedom” seemed in the moment a continuation of the hard-fought battles of the previous decade. But Watergate, according to Sandbrook, was in retrospect an anomaly that only “masked liberalism’s decline,” while the populist voices of Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafly, and Jerry Falwell were emblematic of a “rightward shift” that was taking place long before the Right’s “greatest architect,” Ronald Reagan, won the 1980 presidential election.

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Sandbrook isn’t actually that concerned whether or not you consider this a fresh idea, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. He has more fun riffing on the era’s “films, fads, cults, sitcoms, bumper stickers, best-sellers, and bad juju.” Considering the material—Charlie’s Angels, Japanese cars, the Bee Gees, the Dallas Cowboys—a reader can hardly blame him. In fact, Sandbrook’s “deft, dryly funny observations” on the decade’s cultural bric-a-brac wind up saving the book. Mad as Hell isn’t a major work, but it’s “among the most readable histories of the 1970s I’ve come across.”