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Overview
Alice Echols has never shied away from controversy. Long before it was fashionable, she wrote searing critiques of antiporn feminism. Her subsequent books about the 1960s are trenchant and provocative, and written with unflinching honesty. Now she maps an alternative history of contemporary American culture, taking on such subjects as hippies, gay/lesbian and women's liberation, disco and the racial politics of music, and artists as diverse as Joni Mitchell and Lenny Kravitz. Echols upends many of our bedrock assumptions about American culture since the 1950s, challenging in particular the notions that the '60s represented a total rupture with the past and that the '70s marked the end of meaningful change.
Columbia University Press
Synopsis
Alice Echols has never shied away from controversy. Long before it was fashionable, she wrote searing critiques of antiporn feminism. Her subsequent books about the 1960s are trenchant and provocative, and written with unflinching honesty. Now she maps an alternative history of contemporary American culture, taking on such subjects as hippies, gay/lesbian and women's liberation, disco and the racial politics of music, and artists as diverse as Joni Mitchell and Lenny Kravitz. Echols upends many of our bedrock assumptions about American culture since the 1950s, challenging in particular the notions that the '60s represented a total rupture with the past and that the '70s marked the end of meaningful change.
Editorials
Signs -
[Echols'] essays on social change... are tightly argued and well researched... Intriguing.
Signs
[Echols'] essays on social change... are tightly argued and well researched... Intriguing.— Myra marx Ferree
The Nation -
Alice Echols makes brilliant, fresh, original sense of the contradictory Sixties -- the music, the politics, the people. No one has done more to place the era in context -- its own and ours.
Women's Review of Books
Much more than a rehashing of old work, Shaky Ground blends the familiar with the little known, injects some wry bits of personal and intellectual autobiography, and through the judicious selection and positioning of essays, delivers a work that is more than the sum of its parts.
Los Angeles Times
Compelling... Echols mines unusual spaces -- the hidden compartments of sexual ambiguity, the sweaty floors of discotheques -- to trace the far-reaching reverberations of post-'60's social movements.
The Nation
Alice Echols makes brilliant, fresh, original sense of the contradictory Sixties — the music, the politics, the people. No one has done more to place the era in context — its own and ours.— Katha Pollitt