Friday Finds

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at You Should Be Reading and you can find today's installment here.

I don't always participate in this, but I've got my eye on a book I want to grab on my next library visit.  I love to read social histories and the era between the two World Wars (or one World War with two parts, depending on your point of view) is endlessly fascinating.  This sounds really good and it's gotten some good reviews.

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein. From Agee to Astaire, Steinbeck to Ellington, the creative energies of the Depression against a backdrop of poverty and economic disaster. Only yesterday the Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into the hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that the calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet the recent economic meltdown has once again riveted the world’s attention on the 1930s.


Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called “one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature,” explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein’s fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of the more exuberant side of the era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and the lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing the influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how the arts were then so integral to the fabric of American society.