In New Orleans' French Quarter, a tarot card reader told Polly Deschamps -- runaway daughter of "trailer trash" -- that she would be a success. Thirty years later, Polly is a respected professor of literature with a safe life for herself and her two daughters. Butcher Boy, so dubbed by a horrified community in Minnesota following a 1970s murder spree, was released on his seventeenth birthday, shook the snow from his boots and headed south.
A smug glance at the seventies-the so-called "Me Decade"-unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics-all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. American Cinema of the 1970s, however, looks beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history.
This mild nostalgia piece takes on the 1970s, continuing the progression of Paradox Press!s Big Book series. Vankin (Conspiracies Cover-Ups and Crimes; The Big Book of Bad) divides the book into four parts: Freaky Fads, The Players, And That!s the Way It Was, and Entertainment Explosion. Each section is further divided into several subsections, with entries on topics such as kung fu, John Lennon, energy crisis, and Sesame Street. Most entries are a few pages long, giving the reader a flavor for the personality or topic but not a great deal of depth. The artwork is primarily playful but in some instances serious; in each case, the art supports the text nicely. There isn!t enough substance here for serious investigation of the 1970s, for the observational pieces are brief and the insights revealed in these sketches are small. Recommended for large public libraries, and academic libraries where cartooning studies are offered."
