History @ CUL

Book Reviews: Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive

Librarians often come across book reviews as we peruse the literature.  As we become aware of new reviews of CU faculty books, we will update an entry with the links.  The first book included in this new service is Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press: 2010).

Jim Cullen, Review of Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” Source: Special to HNN (9-21-10)

Rick Perlstein, “That Seventies Show,” Nation, 20 October, reviews a number of books on the 1970s in America.  On Stayin’ Alive: “It establishes its author as one our most commanding interpreters of recent American experience.”

Dalton Conley, “Making Sense of the ‘Me Decade,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 Oct. 2010.

Karl Helicher, Review in Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2010: “VERDICT Along with Francis Wheen’s irreverent Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia, this book will be sure to engross modern American historians and readers who enjoy serious contemporary history.”

UPDATE: Steven Colatrella, “Is a Dream a Lie if it Doesn’t Come True (or is it something worse)?,” New Politics 13:2 (
Winter 2011). “This book is the most important work on the U.S. postwar working class since at least John McDermott’s neglected The Crisis in the Working Class of 1980, and is likely to get more notice than that unsung work did given its unfortunate timing. As a work of history, it might be the most groundbreaking and original national history of a working class since E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, even given its opposite theme which is partly overstated in the subtitle.”

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