Accelerate! by James Brooke-Smith

Accelerate! by James Brooke-Smith

The 1990s was the decade in which the Soviet Union collapsed and Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’. Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Google was launched and scientists in Edinburgh cloned a sheep from a single cell. It was also a time in which the president of the United States discussed fellatio on network television and the world’s most photographed woman died in a car crash in Paris. Radical pop band The KLF burned a million quid on a Scottish island, while the most-watched programme on TV was Baywatch. Anti-globalisation protestors in France attacked McDonald’s restaurants and American survivalists stockpiled guns and tinned food in preparation for Y2K.

For those who lived through it, the 1990s glow in the memory with a mixture of proximity and distance, familiarity and strangeness. It is the decade about which we know so much yet understand too little. Taking a kaleidoscopic view of the politics, social history, arts and popular culture of the era, James Brooke-Smith asks – what was the 1990s? A lost golden age of liberal optimism? A time of fin-de-siècle decadence? Or the seedbed for the discontents we face today?

‘Impressive’– New Statesman

* New Statesman *

‘… delightfully eclectic and repeatedly informed’ – TORONTO STAR

JAMES BROOKE-SMITH teaches English and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. His first book, Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School, was published by Reaktion Books to excellent reviews in 2019.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780750996839
ISBN 10	0750996838
Title	Accelerate!
Author	James Brooke-Smith
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	The History Press Ltd
Year published	2022-09-29
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.