1973 Nervous Breakdown
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
By Andreas Killen
(Bloomsbury USA, Paperback, 9781596910607, 320pp.)
Publication Date: April 3, 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover
Categories: United States - 20th Century (1945 to 2000)
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1973 marked the end of the 1960s and the birth of a new cultural sensibility. A year of shattering political crisis, 1973 was defined by defeat in Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, the oil crisis and the Watergate hearings. It was also a year of remarkable creative ferment. From landmark movies such as The Exorcist, Mean Streets, and American Graffiti to seminal books such as Fear of Flying and Gravity's Rainbow, from the proto-punk band the New York Dolls to the first ever reality TV show, The American Family, the cultural artifacts of the year reveal a nation in the middle of a serious identity crisis. 1973 Nervous Breakdown offers a fever chart of a year of uncertainty and change, a year in which post-war prosperity crumbled and modernism gave way to postmodernism in a lively and revelatory analysis of one of the most important periods in the second half of the 20th century.
Andreas Killen is Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York. He is the author of Berlin Electropolis, and his writing has appeared in Salon and the New York Times Magazine.
"Smart and insightful…[1973 Nervous Breakdown] leave[s] the reader with a palpable sense of how the legacy of the 70's...reverberates to this day in America."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "[A] high-definition snapshot, both nostalgic and perceptive, of a transitional time."
--Library Journal (starred review)
"What makes 1973 a novel contribution to the genre is Killen's assured, interdisciplinary approach to the material. With recurring themes of paranoia, surveillance and fame, the author ties together many seemingly disparate phenomena with much aplomb."
--Time Out Chicago
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