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chewdigestbooks's review against another edition
3.0
Totally Interesting if you are completely into the entertainment of the period, a slow slog if you aren't a superfan and horribly boring if you've never noticed the 30's.
I love the period and it was still long for me, though an interesting view that I've never really pondered.
I love the period and it was still long for me, though an interesting view that I've never really pondered.
llynn66's review
4.0
Throughout my life I have harbored a special fascination for the 1930s. The decade in which my parents were born seemed so remote from my own entree into the world some 30 years later. It was a period of extremes, testing the limits of human resourcefulness and courage, fostering the most brutal aspects of human nature, yet also issuing forth a popular culture of arts and letters that is, arguably, unsurpassed in the 20th century. Morris Dickstein has woven these threads together into an extremely engaging tour of this complex era.
Any fan of the popular culture of mid 20th century America will find much to add to a book or film list. I have not read widely in the 1930s genre, finding myself, instead, leaping from the Jazz Age to the post-war experience in literature. Dancing in the Dark has convinced me that I must fill in the gaps post haste. The work of Nathaniel West now holds particular interest after reading what this author had to say about Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust.
As we now find ourselves in our own era of relative challenge and peril it is inspiring to remember that Hard Times invoked luminous voices during the Great Depression. If our grandparents' generation was able to rise to such a catastrophic occasion in the personalities of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, James Agee, the Gershwins and a pantheon of film stars still viewed as Golden Age performers...certainly we can hope for a little more than Lady Gaga and the second Homer Simpson. (The first, of course, being the main character in Nathaniel West's "Day of the Locusts".) It is interesting to ponder the possibility that times of low prosperity and security may produce more exceptional cultural milestones.
The amazing music, film, product design, fashion and fiction of the 1930s make me feel fortunate to have been raised by people who experienced this era first hand and passed along to me all that was beautiful about it. Hearing, through first person narration, their accounts of day-to-day life in the midst of such deprivation has also been a gift. It puts so much about our own worries and fears into graphic perspective.
Dickstein seemed most sure footed in his literary criticism. His background as a professor of English and Theater at CUNY Graduate Center would explain such fluency. As a huge fan of the music and film of the 1930s, I would have enjoyed several more chapters devoted to these themes (and, therefore, would have read an 800 page book, rather than one that tapped out at 530 pages.) I imagine other authors have covered this ground and plan to seek out such material (some of which was cited by Morris Dickstein.)
Bravo! Dancing in the Dark was a cultural banquet table at which I plan to feast further through the notes I have taken and titles I have added to my reading list at its conclusion.
Any fan of the popular culture of mid 20th century America will find much to add to a book or film list. I have not read widely in the 1930s genre, finding myself, instead, leaping from the Jazz Age to the post-war experience in literature. Dancing in the Dark has convinced me that I must fill in the gaps post haste. The work of Nathaniel West now holds particular interest after reading what this author had to say about Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust.
As we now find ourselves in our own era of relative challenge and peril it is inspiring to remember that Hard Times invoked luminous voices during the Great Depression. If our grandparents' generation was able to rise to such a catastrophic occasion in the personalities of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, James Agee, the Gershwins and a pantheon of film stars still viewed as Golden Age performers...certainly we can hope for a little more than Lady Gaga and the second Homer Simpson. (The first, of course, being the main character in Nathaniel West's "Day of the Locusts".) It is interesting to ponder the possibility that times of low prosperity and security may produce more exceptional cultural milestones.
The amazing music, film, product design, fashion and fiction of the 1930s make me feel fortunate to have been raised by people who experienced this era first hand and passed along to me all that was beautiful about it. Hearing, through first person narration, their accounts of day-to-day life in the midst of such deprivation has also been a gift. It puts so much about our own worries and fears into graphic perspective.
Dickstein seemed most sure footed in his literary criticism. His background as a professor of English and Theater at CUNY Graduate Center would explain such fluency. As a huge fan of the music and film of the 1930s, I would have enjoyed several more chapters devoted to these themes (and, therefore, would have read an 800 page book, rather than one that tapped out at 530 pages.) I imagine other authors have covered this ground and plan to seek out such material (some of which was cited by Morris Dickstein.)
Bravo! Dancing in the Dark was a cultural banquet table at which I plan to feast further through the notes I have taken and titles I have added to my reading list at its conclusion.
eleneariel's review against another edition
4.0
How interesting this was, though requiring some time and patience to get through. I thought I had a pretty decent handle on depression-era fiction and movies until I starting reading about dozens of titles I'd never even heard of.
vader009's review
3.0
A nice think piece covering the influences and motivations of the artists of this period and reading that now, helps to set in some lens the manner in which the more successful artists were able to find success and become American Icons in the coming times. A decent read for those looking to enlighten themselves on the ways that culture helps to dictate art, and as a result how those artists are received during their lifetimes, or revered after they die.
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