Rating: 
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: As one who shares Frum's general views--politically conservative and pro-free market--I was very disappointed by this book. Frum claims to show why the 1970s were important and interesting, but doesn't really bring it off. Mostly, I think, it is because his research was shallow--he used a lot of easily available material, like newspaper articles and well-worn observations from writers like Tocqueville, but does not seem to have gone into the substantial scholarly literature on the social, economic, and political forces he talks about. How We Got Here comes across as a standard conservative rant about how bad the Seventies were without adding much to the discussion. Consequently, much of what he says can be easily dismissed by readers who disagree with him, rather than leading them to question their thinking and, perhaps, to change their minds. This is too bad, because with more research and thought, Frum could have written a more solid and informative book that would have done just that.Frum has a lively style and the book is easy to read, which is why I give it two stars instead of just one. One note to the publishers: the book has lots of typos and even some missing words. The editors and proofreaders should have been more careful.
Rating: 
Summary: Frum Gives A Clear-Eyed Tour Of The "Me" Decade
Review: Near the end of his breezy, fascinating social study "How We Got Here," David Frum correctly but hard-heartedly calls nostalgia "the weakest and most useless of emotions, a narcotic for the defeated and helpless." Starting, rather than finishing, his book with that statement may have warned his audience that his tour of the 1970s would not be sentimental. Rather, Frum clearly presents the events, trends, and legacy in the 15 years preceding Ronald Reagan's election, subtly providing reasoning behind Reagan's landslide victories. Frum presents his arguments skillfully, if with conservative bent. He describes 10 years of self-indulgence, explaining the Me decade in dress, food, music, and home, with humorous to devastating results in family, societal and even religious life. He explains the birth and growth of the urban underclass and the subsequent crime (non-violent and otherwise), drug abuse, and hopelessness it fostered. He describes a governmental system made Byzantine by layers of committees, recalling a forgotten 70s name (Wilbur Mills) as its architect. Most sadly, he describes a judicial system, once bold enough to write the legendary "Brown" decision, arrogantly creating laws for others its members need to obey themselves, with violent, devastating results (The Boston busing chapter is one of Frum's best, and saddest). Frum also shows the deeper truth behind the 70s unforgettable symbols. Behind President Ford's "WIN" button lied 15 years of intentional financial manipulation by his predecessors. Behind John Travolta's infamous white three-piece suit lied an objectification in how men and women saw each other, the result being infamous rises in day care, single motherhood and divorce. Behind the music and costumes of the Village People, the dance floor of Studio 54, and the infamous first scenes of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" lied a new, brazen promiscuity in gay and straight lifestyles. Anyone remembering their history knows the story's villains, heroes, and clowns: Jimmy Carter is honest but weak, filled with wrong ideas. Gerald Ford is a healer with good ideas being foiled by his Congress. Richard Nixon is devious but no more than his predecessors, while Ted Kennedy and George McGovern becomes icons for unbridled liberalism. Frum's right-wing bent (seen by positive reviews from Peggy Noonan and William Buckley) does not diminish the truth of his research or his drawn conclusions. Thankfully, he points to the rise of Apple Computers and the stock market as the seeds of 90s prosperity. You wish for more. This refreshing approach might have invigorated the retelling of the American Bicentennial, the death of Elvis Presley, the all-too-short papacy of John Paul I and the first steps of his successor, the weekly social commentary of "All In The Family," and the beginnings and first responses to the Reagan 1980 campaign. Nonetheless, "How We Got Here" is revisionist only in its central idea of the 70s shaping modern times; it has much to teach and remind to anyone who reads it.
Rating:
Summary: Sociological History at its Finest
Review: The history of a period of time - a day, a month, a year, a decade - Is a popular and enjoyable genre of history. It is usually no more than that, becoming just a list of fads, skirmishes and events. Not so How We Got Here. It is, perhaps, the best such work currently available. This book doesn't only tell you what happened, it also tells you why it did and how it changed the country. The reviewers praised this work, but then referred to Mr. Frum as a "right wing moralist." That says more about the reviewers than it does about Mr. Frum. That may be an accurate description of Mr. Frum's philosophy, but this book is neither right wing nor moralistic, unless it is moralistic to believe that acts and ideas have consequences. If that is so, then anyone with a brain is a right winger. This book doesn't condemn either the 70s or the present; it merely points out the way the country has changed (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) and shows how developments in the 70s effected such change. This is a terrific book.
Rating: 
Summary: Have A Nice Decade >:^\
Review: It's hard to believe that the Seventies are now distant enough that we can presume to try to sum up What It All Meant. Policies, trends, and attitudes that were taken in deadly earnest once are now as dead as the Hapsburg dynasty. And things like the New Left, presumed dead & gone by the middle Seventies, worked their way, tapeworm-like, into the academic and cultural centers of American life, to metastasize as Political Correctness in our own day. The Sixties made the big splash; the Seventies saw the ripples spread out over the entire national surface. David Frum is an outstanding magazine writer, and this book is the more remarkable in that it doesn't read like a series of stitched together articles. This fault is what marred David Horowitz's book about the Sixties, _Destructive Generation_. Each section--on politics, morals, the almost frantic debauchery, education, feminism, Vietnam, etc.--contrasts the situation, policies, and mores of mid-century America with the profound changes that swept the country during that decade. (Curiously, he does not treat rock music, which finally ceased being just entertainment and became a bigger business than major league sports. Plenty of other writers have gone into rock critic overdrive on that score, so it's no big loss here.) Surprisingly, the Seventies do not always come off the worse for the comparison. The civil rights movement may have begun its long descent into senile malcontentness then, but it was also then that the black middle class was cemented and began to expand. Public works may have been paralyzed by quarreling factions, but it was then that deregulation began, which gave us our present consumer paradise. The Presidents may have been crooks and incompetents, but Reagan's rearmament, which won the Cold War, began on top of a build-up from late in the Carter years. Throughout, Frum deploys many interesting details representing the issues he talks about. His writing is very clear--and we know that often clarity is mistaken for truth. Yet his _tour d'horizon_ is an appealing one, and he is honest. He does not glorify the WWII generation more than their due, nor does he try to build a better yesterday. He also says that the Seventies were no blip, but that instead they brought us back to America's pre-Depression usual self--polyglot, pleasure-seeking, and self-interested. The Greatest Generation, says he, were equal to their great challenges, but they were atypical. As for the present, in these hangover years we are newly cautious, not remoralized. He leaves the question open whether we will ever be able to construct anything like the pre-Sixties moral consensus again, though he does not hesitate to say that many aspects of it--high, firm standards in education and culture, loyalty, prompt Americanization of immigrants--would be great to have back. All in all, this is a breezy but thought-provoking trip back to what Doonesbury called "a hemorrhoid of a decade."
Rating: 
Summary: Thesis failure even for one friendly to his philosophy
Review: I recommend reading the review by James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly before deciding. Fallows sounds like a personal friend of Frum but even he doesn't recommend this book. Mostly because he says the book is no more than its thesis. I would say Fallows's review is correct on that point. But I also disagree with Frum's thesis that the Seventies - not the Sixties - brought the big cultural change. It's like arguing that the decade after menopause is the one of change, because there you have ten full years of nonfertility - a statistic that exceeds the decade during which menopause occurs. People of ordinary intelligence would say that the decade of hot flashes and the change from fertility to nonfertility is both psychologically and biologically more significant. That's what the Sixties were like for our values in America. Frum went to Harvard so I know he's smarter than ordinary people. But being smart doesn't mean he should treat us like we're stupid. That's what the thesis of this book does.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant and readable analysis
Review: This is the book for anyone who's ever asked, sardonically or not, "How could the nation ever elect Ronald Reagan president?" Today, many people, young and old, talk about the Reagan years like they some sort of political anomaly. David Frum's excellent deconstruction of the 1970s displaces that notion. But it's not just about how the depressing 1970s gave way to the go-go 1980s. Frum draws a clear line from the intellectual seeds that were sown in the 1950s and 60s, seeds that didn't bear fruit until the 70s, to the issues that influence public discourse and behavior today. The crux of Frum's analysis is that the seventies were a decade where America lost its faith in the concept of the "beneficent organization." This disillusionment crossed the political and social spectrum. The values of organizational hierarchy, centralized planning, self-sacrifice for a common goal, social conformity for the sake of community strength-values that sustained the nation through the Depression, World War II and the explosive American economic growth of the 1950s, ceased to have meaning amid the failures of Vietnam, the scandals of Watergate, decline of U.S. industry and the alarming simultaneous growth in inflation and unemployment. The 1970s particularly marked the limits of the "New Deal" tradition of economic planning that by then was gospel for both Republicans and Democrats. The energy crisis laid bare the ineffectiveness, if not destructiveness, of Nixon's wage-price controls and by extension any other attempt for government to manage markets. Ongoing union corruption, plus the decline of heavy industry and the rise of service-oriented business, marginalized organized labor. Rather than achieve the goal of desegregation, social experimentation such as mandated busing only led to vast white flight and only increased racial separation and the discrepancy in quality of education. In Frum's analysis, the 1970s marked a major upheaval in how we viewed the individual in relation to social structures-be it government, employers, religious institutions or family. It was, in truth, the "Me Decade." Diversity became more important than unity, personal fulfillment became more important than family responsibility, and desires were redefined as rights. Although Frum writes from a conservative point of view, he does not view all the achievements of the 70s as bad. He clearly does not advocate going back to earlier times when racism was tolerated, industries from banking to trucking were heavily regulated and gold ownership was illegal. But he does believe that in many cases, a lot of good values, especially individual responsibility, the willingness to defer gratification and the belief in concepts higher than one's self, were discredited wholesale with bad ones. All in all, the book makes for a very good history lesson. Young people especially may be surprised to learn that less than 30 years ago, mainstream Democrats still viewed the Wall Street investor as a foe of the average wage earner. And far from being embraced by the Conservative Right, American churches were drawing fire for their support of communist activism in Latin America and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Frum does a wonderfully insightful job of showing the thinking, events and policies that brought these dramatic shifts about.
Rating: 
Summary: Talented Writer, Uneven Book
Review: Frum is at his best when examining the major public policy questions of the Seventies from, of course, his very conservative perspective. He has an especially good command of his material when he writes about Nixon's wage-and-price controls, the horrible conflict over court-ordered busing in Boston, and and oil shortages of the mid-70s. Frum is also good on select cultural trends--such as the rise of pornography and the increasingly overt sexuality in more mainstream outlets (such as romance novels). He devotes much attention to the decline of mainline Protestant denominations and the striking rise of divorce statistics. In so doing, he makes a persuasive case that it was the Seventies, more than the Sixties, that really changed American society "for better or worse" (and there can be no doubt that Frum would say the latter). Despite these promising comments on culture, there isn't anything like an attempt at an overview of American popular culture during this fascinating period. Frum has surprisingly little to say about movies or television, popular music (even disco), sports or any number of other significant barometers of the culture. A writer as talented as Frum might have had some important (or at least amusing) insights about, say, Roots, All in the Family, Charlie's Angels, Jaws, Billy Jack, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, or dozens of other memorable pop culture events from the decade. But for the most part, other than the occasional reference to Studio 54, the Godfather movies, or the Village People, Frum leaves this area to other writers. His polemical style occasionally goes over the top, notably in his discussion of gay liberation, where his visceral loathing for gay men becomes obvious. Frum trots out a few sensational anecdotes, involving the more extreme behavior in sex clubs, and leaves it at that, as if that small slice of commercialized subculture were the only part of the story worth telling. His discussion of affirmative action is so one-sided that it lacks credibility. Predictably enough, some of the reviewers above are conservatives who are delighted with Frum's attacks on liberalism and cultural excesses in this book, as they love Frum's polemical pieces in The Weekly Standard. It's too bad that this is likely to be the book's primary appeal. It could have been much more. I got the impression that Frum had a more ambitious plan for this book and ended up finishing it ahead of its time. There are so many things he doesn't address, and the quality of his analysis is so uneven. And the appalling number of typographical errors, incomplete sentences and other word-processor-related mistakes (and the apparent lack of proofreading or even spell-checking) suggests an accelerated publication schedule. One doesn't have to agree with Frum's conservative ideology to enjoy his writing or perspective, as I have in his earlier books. And in places, this book sparkles. Frum began to write a major conservative interpretation of the 70s, and with regard to public policy issues he succeeded. It's too bad that he pulled up short of crafting a more complete and satisfying study of American society during the period.
Rating:
Summary: Close, but no cigar
Review: 'How We Got Here' blames - or credits, the author seems to flip from one side to the other with all the alacrity of a cat on a trampoline - the 1970s for most of the perplexities and peculiarities causing the national heart-burn to-day. This is in diametric opposition to most commentators who, depending upon thier political orientation, heave brickbats or bouquets at the 1960s. Mr Frum cites chapter and verse to support his hypothesis, and in quant. suff. Although the book is, in the main, interesting, and brings back memories of the wretched excesses of the era, it suffers pathetically from proof-readers who apparently dropped out of a government school in California. Words, phrases, complete sentences are dropped without let nor hindrance, and the spell-checker seems to be the one used by the local news broadcast. The author, like so many would-be historians, treats his subject as though it had leapt fully formed from the head of Jove. He makes only nodding references to the past - the past that made the 1970s possible - and even then only to the recent past. The 1950s, to be exact, which to many are ancient history. (That much-maligned period, extending roughly from the end of WWII to the Kennedy assassination, cries out for attention from other than academicians. One day I shall have to write its history, myself - for I lived through it, and enjoyed it, and prospered, and saw many beginnings that came to naught or worse - and that gave rise to the very excesses that Mr Frum excoriates so sagaciously. I am willing to grant his secondary point, that the bloating of government, under which we sweat and complain to-day, was given its greatest impetus since the war in those 1970s, though it began, as everyone not brain-dead knows, in the 1930s under the reign of Roosevelt II. His primary thesis, though he approaches it like a dog going to bed and only after hundreds of pages of anecdote, is this: The 1970s were what they were because of military fatigue. These States had been operating on a war footing industrially and economically since 1939 and the populace were waxing weary. The Vietnam war was unpopular; the liberals in government and the press helped ;make it so. Finally, one supposes, somebody or other in a cubicle in Washington scribbled 'To hell with it' on an official memorandum form and we left. Ignominiously. A form of post-war katharsis is one explanation of the decade, and its influence on our own. Much the same could be said of the 1870s and 1880s; the early 1900s; the 1920s...those times, too, were exuberant, slightly naughty, and brought out the reformers in their legions and phalanxes to harry us. They frowned on the celebration, and did their very best to ensure that the celebration did not grow boisterous, that the revelers comported themselves with decorum, and nobody got noisy. We had the Comstocks in the late 1800s, prohibition between the wars, and now the war on drugs. All reforms; all thumping failures. For all its faults, 'How We Got Here' is worth reading. There are better books; there are worse books; any book is better than sitting in front of the television. There is a warning in it, too, for those willing to find it.
Rating:
Summary: Deporable Decade, Good Book
Review: I have always regarded the 1970s as a deplorable decade: foolish hairstyles and hideous clothes . . atrocious pop music (sadly, re-ascendant today in some quarters) . . . economic malaise . . . international terrorists and domestic anarchists run amok . . . America's prestige and global influence in eclipse, its military left to atrophy, its currency debased, and its loyal allies abandoned . . . energy "crises" exacerbated by our own government's policies . . . inflation and crime running rampant . . . the moral order eroded, replaced by a new culture of victimhood, entitlement and self-indulgence. What a mess! David Frum adroitly captures all this and more in his excellent, eloquent retrospective on the 1970s.
Rating:
Summary: Guide to All Those Years Ago
Review: Once again, David Frum has come up with some very nuanced, textured social commentary. The book is about how the country we have today came to be as a result of trends and events and ideas of the 1970's. He organizes the book around chapters with different themes (distrust of government, inflation, materialism, individualism and so on). Frum manages to combine comprensiveness with a concise writing style. He is a conservative Republican but that's okay; he has some balance and objectivity in his writing. Also good by Frum is "Dead Right."
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