Kirkus Reviews 9/15/07
Populuxe has made it to the twenty-first century, in a new paperback edition from Overlook Press, published in August 2007. And in November came The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies. This brand new book, being published by Sarah Crichton Books/FSG does for the Seventies what Populuxe did for the postwar era. With more than 290 pictures, it evokes a time of shortages and sex, rising prices and widening lapels, thrift store chic and disco decadence. Some people think that the styles and furnishings of the Great Funk era were uglier than those of the Populuxe years. Others look at the book and say, I Want That!
For the people who lived in midcentury America that Populuxe chronicles, ours was to be a magic time, one of great speed and great leisure, a time when dreams would be realized. Some of what was anticipated--that we'd sterilize our guests at the doorstep, for example, or that we'd all wear pajamas and take rocket planes to Florida for the afternoon while robots cleaned the house--were weird even at the time. But it was, nevertheless, an era in which everyone wanted to look forward.
Nowadays, many look back at that earlier era as the magic time. Never before had a country been so rich, and never before had the benefits of prosperity been so widely shared. Instead of building great palaces, or monumental civic buildings, just about everyone got a bigger house and more to put in it. Some say the United States has nothing to show for its moment or unparalleled power. Populuxe is about thr dreams and artifacts of an era more democratic than our own.
Yet, as I wrote at the end of the book, I wouldn't want to live in that era now. It was a period of immense optimism, but limited social imagination. There was plenty of opportunity for material progress, but many of life's possibilities were off-limits. It was an extraordinary time that couldn't last forever, and fortunately, it didn't.
The back cover of The Great Funk
The decade that undid the Populuxe era was the Seventies. That was when many of the promises of the postwar era were betrayed, or shown to be empty or unsustainable. with its litany of scandals, shortages, defeats and betrayals, it was a depressing time. Still, all this failure made room for freedom. It became apparent that there are many ways to live, many ways to be.
If you click on the page called Works, you will find comments others have made about the books. Most of these are positive--it is my website after all, but they are also fairly interesting and give a sense of the issues the books raise. The pages linked to each work offer some short excerpts from the books, some of my comments and an illustration or two. Those pages contain links that enable you to order the books.
