Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

I admit it, we're pop culture nuts and have even written a book ourselves about TV in the 1950s. The best pop culture book we've ever read though is Thomas Hine's Populuxe. (Judging from the reviews here on Amazon we're not the only fans of that book!) In Populuxe, Mr. Hine did much more than coin a cool, evocative word. He blended joyous graphics that blanket you in a warm feeling of nostalgia, with original insights into the culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. Now, years later, Mr. Hine has done it again, this time crafting an astute, fully textured portrait of the 1970s. Remember midi skirts, platform shoes, Jimmy Carter's sweaters, Studio 54, Disco madness, Hot pants, earth shoes, Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, and Star Wars? They're all discussed here (as is much, much more), with cherry-picked photos and commentary sure to stop you in your tracks, and give you many hours of enjoyment. This is a book you'll dip into again and again, like a favorite photo album. It's comfort food for the brain that will nourish your soul as well. Thank you Mr. Hine!

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.

Memories are very personal things. We see snapshots in our brains of where we were, how we felt, how others looked, and what we saw and heard. For those of us who were going to school, getting married, finding a job, and just surviving the 70's, our memories of the times are very self-centered.

Along comes Thomas Hine to put it into context. Joined by great, embarrassing photos of the times, Hine's social commentary explains much of what we remember. A lot more happened in the 70s than bad hair, awful colors, and ridiculous outfits. That macramed plant hanger? Everyone had plants hanging around, because they provided insulation from the impersonal world of work. If we didn't have plants, it was because we didn't think we could commit to keeping them alive. Thus the Pet Rock. Yet as silly as that now seems, the Pet Rock represents a time of single adults living alone. It was in the 70s that generations split up. Grandma, Mom and Daughter started living in three separate homes, a phenomenon which continues today. The now ubiquitous pantsuit is also from the 70s, as women entered the workforce in droves. Research on solar panels began during that time of gas shortages. The demise of job security came as Baby Boomers entered the workforce with five applicants for every job.

Sure, we remember peasant shirts, leisure suits, maxiskirts, and green and gold appliances. I still have the red-copper colored crockpot wedding present. But it wasn't until I read The Great Funk that the episodic memories in my brain began to blend into a picture of the decade I became an adult. Thanks, Thomas Hine.

This book reads as a very interesting dissection of the 1970's and offers some interesting insights into what made the 70's so memorable. The book does a great job of rehashing many of the memorable snippets of the decade like shag carpeting and pet rocks. It also does a decent job of profiling some of the significant political crisis of the era like Watergate, the Oil Shock and the Hostage Crisis.

Still it fails to a large degree because it is so disjointed and doesn't try to tie together all it's various stories into one piece. It's all over the place and is just a jumble of 1970s snapshots. So it's a fun read but don't expect a deeper understanding of the 1970s from it.

The author provides a good oversight of the 70's, with respect to fashion, music, attitude, politics, crime--pretty much all of life's bulletpoints. A pretty decent book. Written in a textbook style.