morris dickstein

Dancing in the Dark A Cultural History of the Great Depression Morris Dickstein W. W. Norton, $29.95, 624 pp. Many a baby boomer was raised on tales of the Great Depression, tales of sharecroppers, breadlines, NRA parades, and sparing a dime for a brother in need. This is just the beginning of the article.  

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great DepressionBy Morris DicksteinWW Norton, £22, 576 pagesFT Bookshop price: £17.60 The final pages of Morris Dickstein's monumental panorama of the 1930s, Dancing in the Dark, present a neat analogy between The Wizard of Oz, the Hollywood fantasy film released in 1939, and The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's grim novel of rural poverty, published to popular acclaim the same year. Like Steinbeck's Joad family, Dorothy and her dog Toto are uprooted by dis  

In hard times, entertainment either grinds it out with the rest of us, or it waltzes. During the Depression in the '30s, there were stories about the plight of the nation's unemployed, like John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," alongside the extravagant musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In the '70s, gritty films like Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" coincided with disco.

The thing that links (the escapism and realism) is an interest in ordinary people   -Morris Dickstein

 

1. Arvind Panagariya, India: The Emerging Giant . Why didn't this book get more attention?  

Morris Dickstein's new cultural history of the Great Depression, called Dancing in the Dark is one of those "everything but the kitchen sink" kind of books — except in this case the kitchen sink does make an oblique appearance, given that Dickstein discusses Art Deco industrial design as well as the dance extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Roth and, of course, John Steinbeck; gangster movies and screwball comedies; the music of Bing Crosby; and the photography of Doroth  

What will unemployment do for art? In the case of the Lehman employees, reported on in this paper earlier this week, the answer was relatively straightforward. It resulted in a bit more of it, several of them having pooled their unexpected reserves of leisure team and energy to create a theatre company – along with much talk of finding more fundamental values in life and getting in touch with the stuff that really matters.  

In the last American century, only two decades genuinely pricked up the nostrils (as Mr. Mount might put it), the 1930s and the 1960s. Fundamentally different eras, they had a similarity. Political dissent — stoked by economic crisis in one case, an unwinnable war in the other — supplied radical thunder, while the best artists, who seemed to come out of nowhere, threw zigzagging lightning strikes that have retained their heat and illuminating light.

the crucial role that culture can play in times of national trial.   -Morris Dickstein

 

Norman Podhoretz is making the rounds to promote his new book, "Why Are Jews Liberals." First came a Q & A with The New York Times Magazine, including this exchange: Why is it such a puzzle to you? Anti-Semitism and the Nazi Party were invented by the political right.  

"I want to find out why I'm working," Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn in "Holiday." Grant's character, a grocer's son who put himself through Harvard, wants to take time off from a promising business career, and Grant makes the proposal sound at once existential and lighthearted—as if he wants to investigate not because he's especially troubled or especially gifted but because this is the sort of thing human beings like to know, and he happens to have the means to try to find out. "The answer can't be

I want to find out why I’m working   -Cary Grant

 

To help guide your reading this fall and into winter, here's a sampling of new releases worth your attention. "The Year of the Flood," by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese). The last from acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood examines a dystopic world ravaged by a natural disaster.