Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

The 1970s were a theme park of mass paranoia. Strange Days Indeed tells the story of the decade when a distinctive paranoid style emerged and seemed to infect all areas of both private and public life, from high politics to pop culture. The sense of paranoia that had long fuelled the conspiracy theories of fringe political groups then somehow became the norm for millions of ordinary people. And to make it even trickier, a certain amount of that paranoia was justified. Watergate showed that the governments really were doing illegal things and then trying to cover them up. Though Nixon may have been foremost among deluded world leaders he wasnt the only one swept up in the tide of late night terrors. UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson was convinced that the security services were plotting his overthrow, while many of them were convinced he was a Soviet agent. Idi Amin and his alleged cannibalism, the CIAs role in the Chilean coup, the Jonestown cult, the Indian state of emergency from 75 to 77 and more are here turned into a delicious carnival of the derangedand an eye-opening take on an oft-derided decadeby a brilliant writer with an acute sense of the absurd.

Francis Wheen is the editor of Lord Gnome's Literary Companion and the deputy editor of Private Eye. He is the author of the bestselling How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World and Karl Marx: A Biography, as well as a former writer for the London Guardian. He has written for publications such as Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, as well as appearing on C-SPAN's Booknotes and National Public Radio.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781586488451
ISBN 10	1586488457
Title	Strange Days Indeed
Author	Francis Wheen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	PublicAffairs,U.S.
Year published	2010-03-02
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.