 "20th
Century Pop Culture"
by Dan Epstein
Carlton Books Limited, 1999
We at Java's Bachelor
Pad are real suckers for pop culture coffee table books. This one
we found recently on a bargain table at the local major bookseller. It
is an overview of the last hundred year filled with glossy pictures and
light-hearted, nostalgic write-ups of America's pop culture currents. Nothing
too deep here. No insights on why things were popular when they were or
how societal changed the aesthetics of pop culture. This is just one of
those cute "Remember when..." type of publications. Even though this book
says is about 20th century pop culture, it glances through the first 45
years in less than 15 pages. From 1945 on, this book goes year-by-year
and tells what movies were popular, what cars people drove, what they wore,
what they did on their Saturday nights, and so on. The book does have some
nice touched, though. With each year, it gives a quick recap at the stories
making news--sort of their way of putting pop culture into perspective.
It also gives a nice recap of the just finished 1990's, a decade that is
already being sucked into the nostalgia way. Overall, if you needed a cheat
sheet of the last hundred years in popular culture, a book like this would
be it.
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