A Waaaaa and an Appeal to the Overmind

[faustus]

If you have a set of work keys and a set of home keys, make sure you take the former when going to your office. (I have spare house keys on my work keys, but the home keys set are fewer in number).


An appeal


I'm trying to get together a list of the Prozac Nation and Tipping Point type volumes from the seventies - yanno, the unexpected nonfiction bestsellers. ETA: The Zeitgeist surfers for the 1970s. A short list would include

• Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will [Corrected - thanks oursin]
  
• Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves [Corrected - thanks oursin]
  
• Lyall Watson, Supernature etc
  
• E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
  
• James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
  
• Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
  
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing
  

I'll add to this list as things occur to me - but I'm sure there's more. (Race and ethnicity? Civil Rights?)

TLS listing:

Books of the 1970s

Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers
Ronald Dworkin: Taking Rights Seriously
Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures
Albert Hirschmann: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism
Hans Küng: On Being a Christian
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia
John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
Gershom Scholem: The Messianic Idea in Judaism
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: Small is Beautiful
Tibor Scitovsky: The Joyless Economy
Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Our Bodies Our Selves was by the Boston Women's Health Collective - do you mean Against Our Will?

When was Fat is a Feminist Issue?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I do - I always blank on the title or the author. Thanks.

FIAFI was: New York/London: Paddington Press, 1978. Thanks!

[gummitch.livejournal.com]

Was The Naked Ape sixties or seventies?

I don't know if you'd count them as unexpected bestsellers, but I think Civilization and The Ascent of Man sold quite well.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Naked Ape is 1967 - so an early influence.

The Clarke and Bronowski probably were more influential as documentaries - Civilisation is 1969, so still in the air, Ascent 1973 so a potential influence.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Was Fat is a Feminist Issue a 70s book?

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Oh - maybe I should read comments before posting!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but thanks anyway.

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

How about "The Female Eunuch" Germaine Greer 1970? My Paladin paperback says "reprinted 1971 (6 times),1972 (5 times), 1973, 1976.

What about "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", or was that early 80s?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I'd assumed that was 1969; but again clearly an impact on the thought along the same way as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (and I see that is 1970 when I assumed 1968; I might be thinking of Betty Friedan, but The Feminine Mystique was 1963). Thanks!

Holy Blood, Holy Grail is 1982, but I'm not sure when the tv versions on Chronicles were. One episode was 1979.

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

A lot of stuff I thought of turned out to be earlier/later than I thought.

I did think of the Cranks cookbook, but that was 82. And obviously from a time when chillies had yet to arrive in Britain.

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

I also remember Linda Goodman's "Love Signs" being very, very big in the late 70's (although probably not the sort of thing you are looking for). Wikipedia does say that her 1968 book Sun Signs was the first astrology book ever to feature on the New York Times bestseller list.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

There is a certain percentage of, um, astrological stuff I will need to read.

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

race and ethnicity
The only thing I can think of is Roots by Alex Haley, and am not entirely sure if it was autobiography or fiction.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall it was presented as one but might be the other...

Charges of plagiarism and making stuff up - but to quote Chief Broom "But it's the truth even if it didn't happen."

This was at the back of my mind, but I thought the book was much earlier. I am going to have a bulging rucksack on Tuesday, coming back from the library.