Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age

Rating:
Summary: TV's "Mister Ed" as a Cold War Rorschach test?
Review: Deprived of its logically impoverished arguments, its lead-footed marches around the evidence, its deadening repetitions, its portentous clichés, its merciless summaries of fourth-rate works of art, and its tributes to such world-historical happenings as Woodstock, James Dean, John Lennon's "Imagine," and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (the only political song that manages to be dumber than "Imagine"), Henriksen's book would be a great deal shorter than its current 475 pages. The obvious advice would have been to remove all the aforementioned stuff and replace it with material that even politically sympathetic readers should expect to see: a careful analysis of the way in which popular culture is produced and consumed, a really critical review of the assumptions and evidence behind both left- and right-wing political ideas, and a thorough investigation of the variety of means by which "cultures" are influenced by the modern state, with special attention to little matters like taxation and conscription.

Rating:
Summary: TV's "Mister Ed" as a Cold War Rorschach test?
Review: Deprived of its logically impoverished arguments, its lead-footed marches around the evidence, its deadening repetitions, its portentous clichés, its merciless summaries of fourth-rate works of art, and its tributes to such world-historical happenings as Woodstock, James Dean, John Lennon's "Imagine," and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (the only political song that manages to be dumber than "Imagine"), Henriksen's book would be a great deal shorter than its current 475 pages. The obvious advice would have been to remove all the aforementioned stuff and replace it with material that even politically sympathetic readers should expect to see: a careful analysis of the way in which popular culture is produced and consumed, a really critical review of the assumptions and evidence behind both left- and right-wing political ideas, and a thorough investigation of the variety of means by which "cultures" are influenced by the modern state, with special attention to little matters like taxation and conscription.