Shaky Ground [Hardcover]

Alice Echols, author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin and Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, Newsday, and L.A. Weekly.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.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.This collection is compelling when Echols mines unusual spaces--the hidden compartments of sexual ambiguity, the sweaty floors of disco-theques--to trace the far-reaching reverberations of post-'60s social movements.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.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.[Echols'] essays on social change... are tightly argued anló‡