Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking work
Review: While I also don't necessarily agree that we "abandoned" South Vietnam after losing more than 50,000 American lives, that is a small objection to what was a very interesting and informative book. It reads like a history book of the 70s, while at the same time showing how that decade, not the 60s, was the time when our traditional social fabric began to unravel. I also really enjoyed Frum's subtle sarcasm and criticsm. As one who grew up in the 70s, I learned a lot about that era and many things were brought to light that explain our current state of moral disarray. This book takes on politics, Hollywood, school systems, churches and many other institutions and showed how the liberalization of all of them brought us to this point.
Rating: 
Summary: Great read without the author being overly biased
Review: David Frum has synthesized a great work on the 1970's. Covering all of the events and interpreting how they created the morals and attitudes of the 1990's. I only could think of two significant events that he passed over, the TV presentation of "Roots" and the rampages of the Son of Sam and the Zodiac Killer. All in all an excellent piece of work, one that does not depend on right or left political views.
Rating:
Summary: For Those Who Want to Know
Review: As one who casually picked up David Frum's book and initially had no intention to buy it, and who thought the title mildly presumptuous, I must say that in some ways it is the most extraordinary book of its type that I've read. Frum's research is prodigious, and he succinctly scans the century as well and the silly seventies. He is uncannily accurate in his recellection of events, and I particularly enjoy how he uses movies through the decades to bolster his conclusion. And what conclsuions! He is daring in judgments to the point of foolhardiness, but every view is substantiated. He is a refreshinhg and iconoclasitc new voice on the national stage, and seems as fearless as he is knowledgeable. I already have his book earmarked for special friends. My only criticism is that his metaphors as they relate to tennis need refining, but he obvioulsy knows Hollywood and the pop-culture industry. After this book I'd be interested in his political views-- he strikes me as one who would not shy from supporting a fellow maverick with Reaganesque qualities-- Sen. John McCain. I impatiently await his next book on any sybject-- he is a btilliant writer too.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read roadmap of the 70s--but it needs editing!
Review: Frum's book presents a compelling argument for his thesis that much of the societal change for which we assign credit/blame to the 60s actually occured in the 70s, and was a product of that decade's culture. He presents a complete--though by no means exhaustive--portrait of America's psyche during the 'Me' decade. Frum writes in a very accessible, easygoing style, but his exploration of the 70s lacks any sense of nostalgia. (For instance, you'll read little of leisure suits, disco music, or Pet Rocks.) Rather, he presents a careful (but not really unbiased) analysis of how social institutions changed during the decade. He points out that much of our present distrust of government does not stem directly from Vietnam and Watergate (as it is usually assumed) but developed gradually throughout the years preceding them. He accurately diagnoses the causes and effects of the decline of "mainline" Protestantism in the 70s. Frum also points out how the sexual revolution happened not during the so-called "Summer of Love" but developed in the early 70s. (I would *love* to see Frum take on the 80s, another greatly misunderstood decade.) All in all, this book is fascinating and highly quotable. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about this strange and powerful period in American history--or anybody who's just looking for a good read. But I've got one quibble, and it's a big one: the proofreading in this book is *atrocious*. I've never seen a book reach the market with more spelling and grammatical errors. Unfortunately, there are factual errors as well: Frum states that , during the winter of 1977-78, "[t]emperatures plunged to minus 100 in Minnesota." That's simply wrong, and it casts doubt on some of the other unsubstantiated statements Frum makes. I don't think this is serious enough to discredit the entire book. Frum provides sources for many of his factual claims; this book would simply benefit from more thorough and careful editing. But read it anyway!
Rating: 
Summary: A Wake Up Call.
Review: David Frum is either young (younger than me), kidding or just needed a sociology subject to write about. I don't criticize youth for their lack of perspective and grasp of history. One needs binoculars to look back and reflect on America's social history. Having age and a sense of understanding along with the looking glass are also handy fundamentals. I am an old man. I've lived, as the expression goes "to see it all." HOW WE GOT HERE, -- the gospel according to David Frum was interesting reading. Gospel truth it was not. Frum cannot be faulted for his strong and often times convincing opinions. He is an effective political writer who presents an interesting point of view. I label his postulation 'Contemporary.' Why? Here is my slant. I grew up during the first half of the 20th century. High school graduation was bittersweet in 1934. The Great Depression was a huge obstacle. Lacking financial assistance for college I went to work. Beans and bacon. Bread, fish and venison were staples besides what was provided from the large family garden. Richard Smith, a close childhood friend had tightly held political views -- much like David Frum. Like me he saw no 'American dream,' no future in the depressed rural mountain life we faced following high school. Joining the military to advance wasn't an option until closer to the 1940s. The 3-Cs (Civilian Conservation Corps) did offer some hope and employment but we declined. Smith was a quintessential woodsman. A survivor. He was also a rebel, one of many who held a general denunciation toward the government, society in general, greed --what easy money did, and a perception that a decline in values was underway. I credit the young whippersnapper who authored the book LIFE WITH NOAH for subjecting my friend and an era of American history that greatly influenced my generation. Richard Smith broke rank with civilization. He departed into the wilds of the Adirondack Mountains to live a hermit's life with (and like) Noah John Rondeau, an older gentleman who had followed the same route in 1913. This common man nonfiction book is an enduring story that offers the current generation a perspective that should teach them that neither technology nor any one decade should take the blame for any current ilk. Obviously I highly recommend the purchase of this book. The vintage photographs alone make it worth the price.
Rating: 
Summary: PURE TRASH!
Review: The contents of this book is nothing more than one man's opinion, it is not based on common fact.The 70s and all the decades that preceded it is not the cause for today's problems. This current decade and the spoiled Baby Boomers running the country such as our moraless President is the cause of our current problems.I don't believe one can blame the 70s or any other decade for our current society.It's the people stupid.We are losing our common sense and values today,because hard work and doing the right thing is being replaced with how can I make easy money? This way of thinking DID NOT originate in the 70s.If this liberal writer wants to blame something,then maybe he should look at technology.
Rating:
Summary: awesome book
Review: I read lots of political and cultural books; this is one of the best. Persuasively agrues that American culture and morality rotted as a result of the 1970s (and not nearly as much the 60s as often asserted). Truluy compelling, and well-written.
Rating:
Summary: OK, but never got through it
Review: Based on the title, I was braced for a heavy-handed indictment of the 1970s. Instead, author Frum maintained a fairly non-judgmental, almost sociological tone to his writing. Except for the occasional cheap shot at a liberal celebrity or politician, the book is a rather thorough discussion of the surface trends that came to the fore in the 70s. I only read about 1/3 of the book, so I don't know whether a moralistic, conservative agenda ever emerged later on. But once I put the book down, I never picked it up again -- maybe because its pop magazine tone focused on outward appearances rather than on deeper social pressures that interest me. But as far as I read, this liberal didn't have much to disagree with. The 70s described in the book are more or less the 70s I remember. A deeper analysis would have kept my attention better. Frankly, I was afraid that I'd feel used if, after being strung along for 3/4 of the book, an alien agenda emerged.
Rating: 
Summary: American Graffiti for Conservatives
Review: Frum's work is not so much a chronicle of an era (for that see Bruce Schulman's The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics) as it is a conservative polemic along the lines of Steven Hayward's The Age of Reagan. Like Hayward, Frum argues "The 1970s were America's low tide." (p. 289) "Disaster followed disaster, and the authorities stood slack-jawed, baffled, and apparently helpless." This impotence was the fault of "the political ideology and personal weakness of the men entrusted with the job of managing the American economy: their utopianism, their arrogance, and then finally their cowardice, dating back to the day that John Kennedy was elected president of the United States." (p. 292). One wonders if historians of future generations will assess in similar terms the supply side deficit financing agenda promulgated by Frum's ideological soul mates since 1981.
Grimly, Frum admits the U.S. has internalized the legacy of the `70s: "... the ending of a revolution is not the same thing as the restoration of the old order. It is the institutionalization of a new one." (p. 173). But he is clearly at odds with that legacy: "Coming a close second to nostalgia in the pageant of uselessness is the sort of complacency that looks at the wreckage left by the rampages of the 1970s and shrugs it off as the price of progress," he remarks (p. 351).
Unfortunately, Frum steers a little too close to nostalgia in most of his criticisms. He can't resist a little over-romanticization of the past, for example in his censuring of the degeneration of speech patterns during the 1970s, when neologisms and street parlance "settled on American speech like a blanket of dust clogging the gears of a once-clean machine," (p. 105), a simile as tortuous as it is dubious.
Some of the language is vivid and snappy - Frum conflates his opposition to the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve and his basic prurience when he writes "In July 1971 testimony to Congress, Burns ruefully admitted that he had been working the printing presses like a New York tabloid editor with exclusive photographs of a topless starlet." (p. 297).
Some of the irony is deliberate, some - ironically - unintentional, including this gem on the privileges of class: "The son's of the rich avoid the draft, but the son's of the poor ship out to Vietnam." (p. 63). From a former speechwriter for George W. Bush! On the other hand, a certain material girl might have done well to take another of his comments to heart: "Imagine a movie like Lina Wertmuller's 1975 Swept Away - which treats rape as a deserved and comical comeuppance for a bossy woman - being released now." (p. 171).
Sexual liberation - apparently of anyone, anywhere - is another nightmare to emerge from the cesspit that was the `70s: Frum describes Marabel Morgan's advice in The Total Woman as "rather sad and desperate: The Stepford Wives crossed with 91/2 Weeks... this upheaval had its victims - and the middle-aged woman prancing around the kitchens nude but for their polyester lace aprons, grimly hoping to defend their homes, were the most comic and the most poignant of them all." (p. 199-200).
Frum is at his cynical best when depicting the divergent paths of the various churches during the `70s, of the way New Age "... ministers ascended to ever loftier peaks of grooviness." (p. 152) and the challenge of feminism to traditional doctrine: "to ordain women would, they feared, cast away the most visible symbol of the old doctrine that Christ was both divine and human, a doctrine ratified more than fifteen hundred years ago in the Nicene creed and held to this day by almost every Christian sect and faction. On the other hand, to refuse to ordain women would constitute a rejection of the new doctrine of the absolute equality of the sexes. Hmmm. The Nicene creed, the equality of the sexes; the equality of the sexes, the Nicene creed..." (p. 151).
Frum says "Mid-century America was materially egalitarian but intellectually hierarchical, an outlook precisely the opposite of our own. Modern America is prepared to tolerate vast inequalities of wealth. What it will not tolerate is any claim of intellectual or cultural inequality." (p. 137). Fair enough, but Frum pushes objective western (i.e. Republican) standards of intellectual and social conformity too far when he compares cults to the "comparative respectability of orthodox Buddhism." (p. 144). Comparative to what - Jims Baker and Swaggart, perhaps?
Sometimes Frum sounds like he's channeling a Goldwater volunteer from the '64 primaries: "To travel the mental distance between our time and the time immediately before ours, we need to understand the outlook that would have found the behavior of a... Nelson Rockefeller wholly unacceptable." (p. 59-60). And who was the beneficiary of that change in outlook? Divorcé and Frum hero Ronald Reagan.
Frum also takes on that bugbear of the right, activist judges: "The sacredness of the law was a petty illusion blown to the winds by the chilly power of the zeal of Brennan's liberal majority to have its own way, regardless of precedent or logic." (p. 230). Frum apparently still carries a candle for the days of separate but equal - he describes the desegregation decisions of 1954 as being made with "very flimsy legal justification" (p. 231). With his opposition to judicial activism and hostility towards "flimsy" legal arguments one wonders what Frum made of the Supreme Court's intervention to halt the 2000 Florida recount. His conservative bias or plain ignorance of political realities is also revealed in comments like "Communist coups were thwarted in Portugal and Chile." (p. 288). With palpable distress Frum laments the inner-city homicide rates but ascribes this too entirely to the breakdown of social values without mentioning the easy accessibility of guns.
All-in-all, a certainly heartfelt, sometimes engaging and occasionally witty tract, but more useful as a political primer than a serious history.
Rating:
Summary: Opinionated and Unsubstantial
Review: Since the seventies are a decade of research importance to me, I was excited to stumble across Frum's book in a bibliography (only about 2 other histories of the decade-i.e. the decade is the main focus-exists). While I was prepared for opinions I didn't agree with in this book-Frum's bibliography (what little there is) reads like a whose who of the reactionary right-there are also many outright distortions and lies, or to use milder terms, lack of sufficient research. For example, Frum cites worker discontent, or ingratitute he implies, at auto plants in the early 1970s along with a statement that labor saw almost no strike activity over "real" issues like wages and dangerous working conditions-this is absolutely false, as anyone with even a smattering of labor history or labor memory would immediately recognize.
Sorry if this short review seems overly snarky-I only made it 40 pages in before I realized reading this book was a complete waste of time from an academic (liberal or conservative) point of view, in which accuracy of facts matter. There is still too much opinionated blather about this decade and too little substantial, thoughtful treatment of it. I am somewhat taken aback that none of the other reviewers noticed any glaring factual errors in this book, even if they are sympathetic with, or admiring, of the opinions expressed.
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