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Summary: One of the best books of the year
Review: This refreshing new book is less a history of the 1970's than an exploration of some of the forces in American society that came to a head in that "slum of a decade," such as the widespread loss of respect for government, runaway inflation, the abandonment of the South Vietnamese, the cult of the self and the corresponding decline of family and community, and race- and gender-based politics. I think it would have been better to leave "the 70's" out of the book's title, but I recognize that almost any book that purports to be about the 1970's will catch the attention of those of us who came of age in that weird and wonderful era.Frum is an excellent writer, and he provides clear and concise overviews of subjects as complex as the Bretton Woods monetary system, national mental-health policy, the economics of oil and the development of busing as a remedy for school segregation. He pays relatively little attention to popular culture, which is probably a good thing, because most of it was awful. For a fun, intelligent look at the popular culture of the decade, check out Edelstein and McDonugh's lavishly illustrated "The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs," which unfortunately is now hard to find. A central question of "How We Got Here" is whether America's confidence in the 1950's, which completely fell apart in the 1970's, was an anomaly rather than the norm. A related question is whether the events of the 1970's represent America's return to its "normal" state -- contentious, disparate and often violent -- or the beginning of a steady national decline from which we will never fully recover. Frum seems to believe that midcentury stability was the product of, as he calls it, "special circumstances," and that we shouldn't be overly worried about our country's future. I agree with him, but it's also hard to ignore the evidence of national decline that he presents so compellingly in this book.
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Summary: Frum's conservartive common sense takes on a decade
Review: For anyone who came of age during the Reagan years but still breaks out in a cold sweat at the thought of McGovern '72 or a Carter reelection this book will help you face your fears. It will have you pounding your fist at 70's mainstreaming of 60's counterculture and praising the 80's attempts at rollback. Frum views the 70's from the right, but his excellent detail and rich ideas synthesized from modern history read like common sense. For readers of National Review or The Weekly Standard this book is an absolute must. For those in search of a mature, substantive explanation and rebuttal of PC excesses, this is the book. I'd gladly place it on the right side of a scale to balance a tall, slightly left leaning stack of college texts covering politics, economics, history, pop culture, and sociology. This book is incredibly well researched, educational and sensical.
Rating:
Summary: Too conservative; but also brilliant.
Review: I hated the Seventies back in the Seventies. I was born in 1970, and I always felt there was something wrong with the deliberate sloppiness of dress, the ugly hairstyles, the terrible shoes, the peace signs, idiots speaking poorly,the insane notion that drugs led to truth, the fetishization of rudeness and informality. This supremely entertaining conservative book doesn't get everything right, in my opinion, but certainly beautifully describes various malaises infecting popular "culture" in America. To the people who think that the seventies were largely good, I would prescribe this excellent book as a counter-argument. Frum's writing is clever and convincing, full of hilarious one-liners and marvelous summings-up. One gets the impression that it's not so much the politics of the 1970s that really annoy him but the style; he doesn't see a growth of freedom but of license. If you have every felt this way about the modern world, read this. If you have not, you may as well be exposed to this point of view for the sake of broadmindedness, and you couldn't find a better writer than Frum. He takes Foucault to task for providing the intellectual groundwork for the left to not be able to complain about our city streets full of insane people; he critiques the excesses of affirmative action intelligently;he provides hilarious asides about the failure of discipline and grit amongst the opulence of the baby boom generation. A fellow in a review below this seems to think that Frum is mainly motivated by Republican politics. I don't think so: I think he's motivated by good taste. As a Democrat, I don't agree with all of what Frum says, but it's witty and provocative and often he makes very good sense.
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Summary: Request To Mr. Frum:Please Write Your Next Book on the 1990s
Review: This is a brilliant book. Mr. Frum has written about the 1970s in a style that should be the model for all future historians. All works on a historical time period should take Mr. Frum's lead in combining politics, pop culture, values, and yes, humor into a single work. Frum's thesis - that the origin of what we call the "modern world" came from the 1970s - is proved beyond a doubt. It was a time, you could say, when 1960s political values came into our backyards. Freedom marches in Selma became forced busing in Boston. Flower children became porn stars in our living rooms. Of course, this condition was accompanied by a violent backlash from conservatives. The meeting of these two cultures naturally led to war. In the courts. In the schoolboards. In our government. In most cases, liberal values won out. Where liberalism wasn't as successful was in the economic sphere, where inflation discredited government planning and regulation almost as badly as the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire in the 1930s. The post-war political consensus on the economy and social values ruptured along several faults and the consequences of that split affect us to this present day. Frum analyzes this condition with candor and facts. From Vietnam to Watergate, from blue jeans to disco, from divorce to busing, from New Age cults to Arab sheiks, you will not find a better read on the 1970s than in the pages of this book.
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Summary: This is essential reading! Brilliant!
Review: David Frum's new book is a masterpiece of historical, social, and economic analysis. Frum persuasively makes the case that the 1970s were far more influential than the 1960s in terms of impact upon the future of America. Frum obviously evaluates the 1970s from a very conservative point of view, but he is a not a new-jerk conservative who automatically condemns everything about the 1970s and nostagically longs for the 1950s. Frum contends that the social conventions and mindsets which prevailed between 1920 and 1970 constituted a unique period in American history, existing due to the demands of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Therefore, change was inevitable. Nevertheless, much of the change that occurred in the 1970s was undesirable because of its devestating impact on our culture. Frum accentuates the negative changes, but towards the end of the book he discusses the rays of hope that emerged at the end of a dark decade - deregulation, tax revolt, etc. Frum ranges across a remarkably diverse group of subjects from fashion to environmentalism to inflation in concise, definitive essays. Frum so frequently overwhelms the reader with his mastery of detail and narrative that editorial elaboration is not even necessary; he has already made his case. His prose sparkles and dazzles with the best style of any contemporary political writer. The book was a real page-turner; I could not put it down. I stayed up to 1 A.M. three nights in a row to finish it.
Rating: 
Summary: It's about more than just the '70s
Review: David Frum's book is fascinating for a number of reasons. He correctly locates the 1970s - not the 1960s - as the decade in which the current social, economic, cultural and political conditions of the US (at least as of 2000, when the book was published) were established. We should quibble with many of his interpretations of the specifics of the time, but I would argue we ought not treat this book as a work of history. Instead it is a conservative's attempt to make sense of the 20th century and direct other conservatives to pinpointing the true periods of decline and of promise. Towards the end, Frum revealingly argues that conservatives should not idealize the 1950s as the period in which American society was greatest. Instead he attacks the New Dealist vision of government that underwrote the 1950s boom as restrictive of freedoms. Instead, he argues, conservatives should look at the pre-Theodore Roosevelt period as a time when Americans were freer, more religious, more moral. In this he is not so different from Grover Norquist, who argues along the same lines, but Frum's is a more intellectualized argument. At other times, Frum reveals lines of thinking that would become important and influential after September 11, such as his dismissal of anti-Iranian prejudice in the wave of the 1979 hostage crisis, or his complaints about weak US responses to terrorism. It is important to note that the contents of Frum's ideas were worked out in full by the end of the 1990s - September 11 simply provided a vehicle to put these ideas into practice. If you want to learn about the 1970s, skip this book. If you want to learn how the right-wing theorizes the 20th century, however, it's a must-read.
Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable
Review: David Frum has gives a panoramic, at times disorienting view of the seventies. His digressions are never distracting, and he succeeds in giving needed context regarding the cultural, political, and economic changes that got their start in the 70's. Frum is insightful and evenhanded -- Republicans and Democratic politicians alike are critiqued. What surprised me about the book wasn't how shrewd Frum was, it was what a delightful read the book was. This is not preaching to the conservative faithful, like, say Ann Coulter's "Slander." He's closer to David Brooks in temperament -- funny, compassionate, and unfailingly observant. It's a book that deserves to be read widely.
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Summary: The birth of the America of today
Review: Frum's book covers areas not covered by the Bruce Shulman book, The Great Shift. Like the Shulman book, Frum points to Vietnam, in particular My Lai, as a milestone, when we discovered we weren't infallible, morally and otherwise. Was it any wonder that a high rate of AWOLers, deserters, and dishonourable discharges ran rampant during the 1970's? And like Shulman's book, Frum argues that it was the 1970's that made the America of today, not the 1960's. The sobering disillusionment of the law is covered in "The Law Is Crazy" section. The crime rate skyrocketed with the influx of poor blacks from the South to the urban North. Crime was named as the biggest fear Americans faced in the 1970's. The thing was, people who became victims didn't bother reporting it because they figured the law wouldn't do anything about it. Frum lists pride, guilt, and laxity in policing as the diseases that bred disrespect for law in that decade. The Dirty Harry and Death Wish movies were clearly responses to the crisis on hand, and it wasn't surprising, now that I come to think of it, of the many cop shows that aired, such as Columbo, the Rockford Files, Kojak, CHIPS, Hawaii Five-O, and The Streets Of San Francisco, during that decade. It was a cry for law and order, to use Richard Nixon's slogan for 1968. We got into a buying binge with the credit card from the 1970's, where despite being socked by the Great Depression, Americans figured as long as post-war prosperity continued, splurging was in. People could gain more material possessions and boost their status, and with inflation eliminating a little percentage of one's debt, why not spend now? "Self-denial was becoming downright irrational," according to Frum. The Energy Crisis: ah yes, in 1973 and later in 1978. We became more aware of our dependence on foreign oil and the realization that we only had a finite amount of natural resources, and that we would have to cut back or find some efficient method of fuel.
It was also that time that the Arabs were seen as the new masters of the world, as they controlled the oil spigot. The story of the detainment and release in France of one of the masterminds of the Munich Olympics massacre testifies to that. And along with the Arabs, came hijacking incidents, especially Entebbe. However, let's not forget liberation. There was also a sense of easing authoritarian institutions. In the case of law enforcement, it was bad, but in terms of religion, maybe that's what was needed to counterract the desertion of pews in both Catholic and Protestant churches. And sex? That was the most positive aspect of the 1970's right there. The mouthful of words POSSLQ (person of opposite sex sharing living quarters) has fortunately been changed to "significant other" of today. The taboo of living together out of wedlock was shattered. "Nice girls do" and "The day may come when we regard chastity as no more a virtue than malnutrition" were two quotes typifying that era. Too bad AIDS nipped that in the bud. Frum's book is a needed companion to Bruce Shulman's work. If I had a time machine, the Me-Decade is one place high on my place to visit.
Rating: 
Summary: More Ideology Than Analysis
Review: David Frum's How We Got Here is a contentious look at the 1970s through a reductive, post-Cold War, pre-Sept. 11 viewpoint. Early on, though, Frum forfeits all credibility as a social prognosticator. "America at the beginning of the twenty-first century," he writes, "is rich beyond all reckoning... And unlike any previous great power... Americans can see nobody and nothing on the horizon who would dare to take, who could even imagine taking, all this away from him." Has anyone ever been proven so wrong so quickly? This statement must rank with Neville Chamberlain's claim of having achieved "peace in our time" for rampant idiocy. As for the book as a whole, it's a mess, strangled by its own ideological blinders, and it's filled with errors, large and small. Frum likes to pose as an expert on pop culture, but gets nearly everything wrong: dates (he thinks Kramer Vs. Kramer came out in 1978 instead of 1979, and Network in 1975 instead of 1976), plot points (on page 13 he misreads the opening of The Godfather, and turns John Shea in Costa-Gavras's Missing into Jack Lemmon's daughter, instead of his son) and categories (he thinks that the Best Supporting Actress Oscar is for the lead role in a film). Being a Canadian, he also makes factual and nomenclatural errors that a native would spot instantly (and that his proofreaders -- if he had any -- should have caught). He thinks on page 226 that Brooklyn was a borough before 1898, when it merged with Manhattan to make Greater New York (the borough usage only came into effect afterwards -- before 1898, Brooklyn was its own city), and believes that Americans "queue" instead of getting in line (on line, if you're a New Yorker). He also misuses the possessive, and talks about "Richard Nixon's Supreme Court" (on page 18) and "Meryl Streep's filmed biography of Silkwood" (on page 129). The proofreading is atrocious. One can understand his misspelling Götterdämmerung (on page 328), but how do you explain the "Delaney" Amendment becoming the "Delancy" Amendment on the same page (page 127)? Sheer sloppiness. My favorite blunder is on page 336: "By the end of the century, one out of every American babies would be born to an unmarried woman." One out of what? If a writer gets so many small things so hopelessly wrong, how can you expect to trust him when he goes in for sweeping analysis? The answer is, obviously, that you can't. And Frum's analysis is predictably simpleminded. He blasts Janet Reno for "taking responsibility" for the Waco debacle without doing the honorable thing and resigning (on page 136), but doesn't mention that one could accuse Ronald Reagan for doing the same thing concerning Iran-Contra. He writes disparagingly of the Hare Krishnas on page 146 that "the price of this ecstasy was the surrender of one's critical faculties," but when he comes to write about evangelical churches on page 154 ("...the churches that continued to grow after 1965 were precisely those that eschewed ritual and instead embraced the emotional, even the ecstatic"), he fails to make the obvious point that the evangelicals are doing exactly the same thing as the Krishnas. He points out on page 323 that "The well-to-do had to soar very high into the earnings stratosphere before they faced a marginal rate of more than 22 percent in the 1950s, and even then generous loopholes relieved the pain," and contradicts himself on page 350, when he writes that "But would they pine for [the 1950s] if they remembered more clearly that the top rate of federal income tax was 90 percent?" Frum's cartoonish conclusion boils down to this: Once upon a time in America, things were peachy. A good Republican named Ike was in the White House. Conservative Caucasians with penises ruled the country. America was a white nation that didn't let in any nasty dark-skinned immigrants. Women stayed at home and were barefoot and pregnant. Negroes knew their place. It was wonderful. Then the liberals came along and ruined everything. Kennedy and Johnson got us into Vietnam and ruined the economy. Women decided they had rights. So did Negroes and Homos. Everybody marched. It was awful. Nixon said he was a Republican but he was really a liberal. Ford too. Carter was the worst. Things had gone all to hell in this country. Kids couldn't pray in school the way God wanted them to. Women who'd been raped could get an abortion. Blacks could sit in the front of the bus. Who wants a country like that? Then came a man named Ronald Reagan on his big white horse, and he fixed everything. He cut money for those nasty welfare cheats and pumped billions into defense, where it belonged. Real men, conservative white men, were running the country again, and it was wonderful. So remember boys and girls, everything liberals do is bad. Everything conservatives do is good. Now, if you get your information exclusively from Fox News, you're apt to agree with Frum's simple-minded analysis (assuming you can read at all, which is doubtful). But for those people who lived through the era and remember it, Frum is like a blind man trying to describe a Jackson Pollock painting. His knowledge is shallow, his erudition faked, and his conclusions are more a product of ideology than analysis. I wouldn't bother with this book.
Rating:
Summary: Witty and irreverent, but not scholarly
Review: I read this book as part of a graduate school class in recent American history. When compared to the works of professional scholarship we read for class, this book lacks much. It is not written in a scholarly tone, based mostly on secondary sources, and has quite a few rather obvious grammatical and typographical errors (who proofread this thing!?!?) That said, however, I did enjoy reading this book. It is at times laugh-out-loud funny and its point-of-view is definitely different from most works of history, which tend to be left of center. I would recommend it for the layman who is looking for a good overview of Seventies history from a conservative viewpoint. Professional historians or students of history should probably look elsewhere.
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