The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies

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.

Finally, a book on the 1970s that gets a larger theme beyond watergate and inflation. The Great Funk is about ideas, consciousness and meaning. The Great Funk is the book that gets at the meaning of polyester and WIN buttons: the great theme of the big funk. One of the reasons for this is that its author is a sober, serious historian who is also a design critic. Hine gets that things like fashion and design can reflect profound changes in consciousness. To my mind he is the first author to try and make sense of that decade's fashion choices. Hine's book is dense with information and is an absolute must for anyone interested in the 1970s and above all, for anyone sick of the standard baby boomer narrative of history that we've been stuck with for the past thirty years.

The typography and the pictures in the book are very interesting and make you want to read more. Its for class but I stll sinjoy reading about the seventies

This book is actually very annoying and so is the author. It's written with a heavy-duty leftist point of view where everything has a political slant, even if he's talking about a couch or a shag rug. Great pictures, though.

An easy and informative read. Worth the price, very groovy, and it arrived at a convenient time. It's far out.

Not too long ago, there was a popular television show called That Seventies Show, which renewed interest in the fads, fashions, and thinking of that decade. Author Thomas Hine describes the culture of the 1970s in his book, The Great Funk. The book is as much a pictorial overview of the decade as it is a cultural essay.The seventies were a decade of runaway inflation. A person could buy 8 loaves of bread for a dollar at the start of the decade, but only 1-1/2 loaves at its close. A gallon of gasoline cost about thirty-five cents at the start of the decade, but ballooned to nearly one dollar in 1979. Today, that loaf of bread will cost you $1.99 on sale, although you can find them for a buck a loaf at the Entenmen's Outlet. A gallon of gasoline can cost anywhere from $3 - $4 a gallon.Women asserted more independence in the decade. A book by Betty Friedan, penned in the early sixties, called The Feminine Mystique, led many women to reconsider their relegation to the Cult of Domesticity. They entered the workforce in real numbers in the seventies and asserted their rights as a group. The words of a popular song by Helen Reddy symbolized the movement: "I am woman, hear me roar." You can see a picture of her in a blue outfit in this book.There was renewed effort to pass The Equal Rights Amendment, but a campaign led by Phyllis Schlafly prevented enough states from ratifying it. You can also see a picture of her in the book. Today, the Equal Rights Amendment is still not part of the constitution, even though many of the fears raised by Schlafly have come true. There are women in the military, and there was a recent movement in many states to legalize same sex marriages.Ironically, the Equal Rights Amendment has not been reconsidered. Although women still earn less money than men, studies indicate that this is because of supply and demand issues. Women who take time off to raise children have less work experience, so they probably wouldn't earn the same salary as the same-aged man who didn't take any hiatus from his profession. Women are also less prevalent in financial and technical professions, which pay higher salaries. The economist Thomas Sowell makes these arguments in his well-written economics books.Another popular song during the decade was, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" The Close Encounters chapter of The Great Funk deals with such topics as the popularity of Porn and the Gay Liberation movement. The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, which really wasn't as out of the blue as Hine states. The publicized case of Sherri Finkbine, a host of a children's TV show called Romper Room, emerged in the sixties. Finkbine and her husband wanted to get an abortion after learning that a medicine that she was taking for headaches caused major deformities in children. Many states had passed laws loosening restrictions on abortion before abortion advocates approached Norma McCloskey about being a test case.Hine credits the different movements to different views of consciousness. Americans had traditionally espoused rugged individualism, but switched to a corporate consciousness of technological progress and group welfare after World War II. The sixties diffused consciousness in many different ways. The consciousness of the fifties didn't work for women, gays, and minorities. The seventies was a time to look at the world through their eyes.The seventies brought about a crisis of confidence, as President Carter called it, or general malaise of the American population, as people remember it today. "Are you better off than you were four years ago," Ronald Reagan asked prospective voters during his debate with Jimmy Carter in their 1980 campaign for the presidency. People were not better off, and many traced it back to a distrust of incompetent government. Many of the things that Lyndon Johnson claimed about the war in Vietnam were proven to be untrue, and many of the public statements of Richard Nixon about Watergate were also untrue. The style and culture of the seventies reflected some of these shifts in public attitude.There are several hundred pictures in the book, so readers can get a good look at the pet rock that they never had or the earth shoes, leisure suits, and hot pants that they never wore, as well as investigate several streams of consciousness which had previously been unconsidered.

The book is fascinating, love it. I'm, just, enjoying reading it, for my own pleasure.