Strange Days Indeed
The Golden Age of Paranoia
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Descripción editorial
Strange Days Indeed tells the story of how the paranoia exemplified by Nixon and Wilson became the defining characteristic of western politics and culture in the 1970s.
Francis Wheen will vividly evoke the characters, events and atmosphere of an era in which the truth was far stranger than even the most outlandish fiction.
Reviews
Priase for ‘Mumbo Jumbo’:
‘A brilliant, eccentric book.'
Observer
‘Wheen has a Swiftian relish for exposing the cant that attends the 'new rationality’…bullshit's enema number one.'
Tim Adams, Observer
‘Hugely enjoyable…delightful reading.’
Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times
‘Lightly and often hilariously told as it is, this book does make it clear that respect for truth and reason is retreating and mumbo-jumbo has a new confidence everywhere…This amusing, intelligent and elegantly argued book is as good a demonstration of the values it defends as could be imagined.’
Philip Hensher, Spectator
‘This book is a manifesto for rescuing the greatest philosophical movement of the past millennium. You have a choice: either read it or, pre-emptively shred your brain in anticipation of the coming darkness.'
Independent on Sunday
Named as a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Observer and Daily Telegraph.
About the author
Francis Wheen is an author and journalist who was named Columnist of the Year for his contributions to the Guardian. He a regular contributor to Private Eye and is the author of several books, including a highly acclaimed biography of Karl Marx which has been translated into twenty languages and the bestselling How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. He recently wrote the screen play for The Lavender List, a biopic on Harold Wilson's last days in government. His collected journalism, Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies, won the George Orwell prize in 2003.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1970s is the most deranged of decades in this rollicking, lurid retrospective. Taking Richard Nixon s paranoid persecution complex as the period s zeitgeist, Private Eye deputy editor Wheen (How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World) finds it everywhere. Along with an amusing rehash of Watergate, his panorama of 70s nuttiness encompasses conspiracy theories, Hollywood thrillers, the Baader-Meinhof gang, sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick s letters to the FBI denouncing his literary agent as a Communist, and tawdry political intrigues in a Britain beset by strikes, power outages, IRA bombings, Trotskyist dramaturgy, and coup whisperings. Anthropomorphized, Wheen writes, the decade would be a meth-swilling vagrant waylaying passers-by to tell them that the Archbishop of Canterbury had planted electrodes in his brain. Wheen thinks the period s ravings were both laughably lunatic and on to something important in a world of covert ops and oil embargoes, but his paranoia diagnosis is too pat to fully capture the politico-cultural chaos. Still, writing like Hunter S. Thompson might have had he been English and sober, Wheen offers a vivid, entertaining guide to an era of fear and loathing.
