Recommended Reading: 'Strange Days Indeed'

The long weekend gave me a chance to finish Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia, which has been out for a few months now, but, whatever, I’ve been busy. It’s something of a companion piece to Andy Beckett’s When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, but it is far more international in scope: Wheen looks at the paranoia of Nixon, Mao, Harold Wilson, and a range of other topics including underground liberation groups and conspiracy theories in popular culture. Each chapter could be the subject for an entire book (and, in most cases, has) but Wheen’s expert gloss and the continuing accretion of details gives an excellent picture of a decade where it seemed like everything was pointing toward “the end.” It is oddly comforting if you’re the kind of person who reads each day’s news with a deepening sense of gloom and dread; Wheen suggests that you’ll experience “flickering glimpses of déjà vu,” which is certainly true, but it’s also nice to know that our current craziness is not at all new. You will probably enjoy this one.