Customer Reviews

Going Home to the Fifties

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I've been fascinated with the 50's since I was a child. Almost everything I've read on the 50's has been clouded with cynicism. While reading this book, I really felt like I was transported back in time and into the minds of people who were living in this time. I felt it did a great job of explaining "materialism" and "housewives" (that had normally gotten such a bad reputation). I just don't think I can say enough good things about this book. I'm glad I bought it, and will hopefully share it with others who share my fascination and enthusiasm.

a book that celebrates that wonderful decade known as the 1950's and does so without irreverance, parody, or sarcasm. I came across the wonderful gem of a book quite by accident. For years, I had wished that someone would write a book that highlighted this time in American history and Bill Yenne does a SUPERB job.

Not only is the text informative, but the wonderful pictures and illustrations, along with real advertisements, make this book a must-have for the serious afficianado. Unfortunately, you can find books out there about the fifties, but they are written by those who want to make fun of that time and use intellectual sophistication to castigate this era in America. How do I know it was such a good time?

Well, I don't recall high school students shooting and knifing other students. Teen pregnancy numbers were quite low, movies had a point to them, drug abuse wasn't rampant, and some things were still honored and revered, such as church, country, and family. (No, I am not a Falwell/Robetrtson/Dobson right-wing fundamentalist.) But I am a moderate and I guess one of the many things I love about that time was its moderation and its optimism.

Here we were right after a world war, eager to achieve and enjoy the promise of America and full of boundless optimism about our future. President Eisenhower led with a fatherly hand, and people grew and flourished. The malcontent and sociopath were the exception rather than what seems like the rule today. People seemed to have some reference to the whole rather than just an apathetic, "I don't give a damn" attitude. There were no violent gangsta rap songs flooding the airwaves with hate, and wonder of wonders, the music was really good-now considered classic.

Yes, those halcyon days are gone now and we've "grown up." Just about anything goes and you don't have to look very far to find a social or psychic cesspool to wallow in. Being born in the late fifties, I know that my generation is the last to have enjoyed the fruitage of that great decade. But for a time, it was ours and it was sparkling, and it was the real deal.

So get this book and spend an afternoon savoring each delicious memory and picture. You can't help but feel better after you put the book down and in fact, will find yourself returning there again and again.

I was intrigued when I first saw this pop up on Amazon while looking for another book about the Fifties and I placed an order. Now having read and looked through it a more apt title would be 'Going Home to the White Middle Class Suburban Fifties'. The author covers the period with a rather narrow focus, concentrating mainly on home life in the newly built suburbs and the reason for this is because nearly all the interesting illustrations (paintings and photos) are images taken from ads of the time. There are chapters about The Living Room, In the Kitchen, The Bed and Bath, Watching Television, all areas where pictures from ads would be available but no chapter, for instance, about suburban shopping, supermarkets and malls were not heavy advertisers in mass-market magazines back then. It does seem odd to allow the availability of ad images to dictate the contents of a book about the recent past.

This does create some odd situations, page thirty-seven shows a Saturday Little League game with an Oldsmobile taking most of the space, page forty has a painting to show a village theater but it is dominated by a 1957 Oldsmobile, on pages forty-one and forty-two the five-day-a-week trek to collect commuter hubby from the train station uses a painting with six Chevrolets taking more space than the train.

The author covers the period in a straightforward way and I get the impression that it is the pictures that count rather than the words (set in a rather large type size) which just fill out the space between the two, three or four pictures on each spread. The captions are redundant as they only describe what can be seen in the pictures. There is a good index but no bibliography.

'Going Home to the Fifties does capture some of the feel of this wonderful period for the white middle classes and it was a neat idea to use the very images that helped to create this feeling but I think another book does a better job, the stunning 'All-American Ads: 50s' by Jim Heimann, 960 pages of color ads including many that had the pictures used in Bill Yenne's book but now you can see and read the whole ad.

*I've done two Listmanias on the 50s with over fifty books, especially visual ones.


***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click on 'customer images' under the cover.

This book has some nice vintage advertsing art in it, but I must say the text is pretty light-duty and seems to be aimed at young readers. There are also several typos and some wrong information. The book definitely has merit, but there are books that cover aspects of the same subject with much greater depth, like Thomas Hine's "Populuxe", Lesley Jackson's "Contemporary", Michelle Gringeri-Brown's "Atomic Ranch" and, for the serious historian, David Halberstam's definitive tome "The Fifties." But as an introduction to the 1950's lifestyle for someone new to the subject, this book works just fine.

"Going Home to the Fifties" offers a very charming and engaging look back to the most prosperous decade in history. It's not a history book, but rather a "keen" review of the times and how the changes following WWII defined the era. I particularly like how the book starts off asking, "What were the Fifties?" and "When did the Fifties actually begin?" It also helps the reader understand that, while today the Fifties are criticized for being too conservative and suppressive, people living back then were quite privileged. Families were enjoying luxuries and amenities only dreamed of by previous generations, especially coming out of the '30s and '40s where Americans had to deal with the hardships of the depression and war. The Fifties really were simpler times and this book lets you experience its joys all over again, or for the very first time.

"Going Home to the Fifties" is a delight for the eyes; especially for those Baby Boomers who were often referred to as the "luckiest generation" because of the post-war prosperity being enjoyed at the time.

Mom wasn't home every day when we got home from school because she was a "career girl"; the only working mother I knew at the time. My parents were not Ward & June Cleaver, but I had a wonderful childhood!

The house was always immaculate; even though there were four young boys living at home. We had a nanny who sat with us after school and she was my surrogate mother.

This is a great book if you grew up in the 50's or early 60's. It is nicely divided into sections which flow evenly and make sense. Spends great amount of time not only on 50's icons, architecture, products BUT also why the 50's were the 50's. Great in depth analysis.

However, it is a paperback with about 150 pages. The sellers who are aking $900 for a book I bought in my local bookstore, new, for $19.99 is absurd. Contact the publisher, you can order from them. It is through Chronicle Books in San Francisco.

This book was part an Amazon buy together with Armstrong's Inspiring 1950's Interiors (which is what I was initially interested in purchasing); I expected something along the same lines. There aren't even any actual photographs. They're all drawings. The book is basically a story about what people did in the 1950's. If that's what you're looking for, then this would be up your alley. I was looking for more design inspiration. I wish that I would have purchased Armstrong's Inspiring 1960's Interiors instead.