Shaky Ground

Shaky Ground

From Publishers Weekly This collection of 15 essays by a noted social critic makes a good stab at reassessing both the decade and its continuing effects on culture and politics. Echols's canvas is broad, covering everything from the effect of TV on the civil rights movement in the 1950s to fights between lesbians and heterosexual women in the feminist movement of the 1970s and the sexual subtext of disco. The best essays relate directly to the '60s. "Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury" discusses the economics of the invention of "hippie clothing," how the accessibility of cheap commercial real estate helped promote rock music culture, and the ideological wars between the anarchist, politically astute Diggers and the more amorphously constituted "hippies." Even when the pieces lack a clear narrative line, Echols scores points with smart critiques of popular culture, such as her look at Joni Mitchell's engagement of race in her music or her critiques of Andrea Dworkin's views on porn. All but three of these essays are reprinted from various venues, including the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly and a slightly rewritten chapter from Scars of Sweet Paradise, her critically acclaimed biography of Janis Joplin. They thus have trouble holding together as a '60s book; a Voice review of Eric Lott's great 1994 book, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, for example, is perceptive, but sits alone with only the slightest connection to the other pieces. Echols is a great cultural critic, but this book, as a single work, is less than the sum of its parts. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Alice Echols has never shied away from controversy. Long before it was fashionable, she wrote searing critiques of antiporn feminism. Her subsequent books about the 1960s are trenchant and provocative, and written with unflinching honesty. Now she maps an alternative history of contemporary American culture, taking on such subjects as hippies, gay/lesbian and women's liberation, disco and the racial politics of music, and artists as diverse as Joni Mitchell and Lenny Kravitz. Echols upends many of our bedrock assumptions about American culture since the 1950s, challenging in particular the notions that the '60s represented a total rupture with the past and that the '70s marked the end of meaningful change. From Library Journal Echols (The Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin) reexamines post-World War II America in this fine collection of essays. The work's first part covers the 1950s and 1960s by exploring the hippie culture of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury area and the early development of radical feminism. This section also has an interesting historiographic chapter on books that reevaluate the 1950s as the actual starting point for many radical changes that occurred during the 1960s. Part 2, the book's strongest section, provides a critical analysis of the mainstream feminist movement and the radical movement from the perspective of an insider involved in the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s. Included here is a valuable introduction to the major feminist thinkers and writers of the period. Part 3 discusses rock music, including a brief history of disco and its surrounding issues of race, and a fine interview with Joni Mitchell. Well written and thought-provoking, this work is recommended for all academic libraries. Stephen Hupp, West Virginia Univ., Parkersburg Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Much more than a rehashing of old work, Shaky Ground blends the familiar with the little known, injects some wry bits of personal and intellectual autobiography, and through the judicious selection and positioning of essays, delivers a work that is more than the sum of its parts. - Women's Review of BooksThis collection is compelling when Echols mines unusual spaces--the hidden compartments of sexual ambiguity,