Why read Stayin' Alive?

Book cover of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

Book description

Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book makes new sense of the 1970s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from New Deal America, with its large, optimistic middle class, to the widening economic inequalities, poverty and dampened expectations of the 1980s and into the present. Cowie also connects politics to…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Stayin' Alive as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Erica J. Ryan

Author

I chose this book for two reasons. First, Cowie masterfully documents the hugely significant political and social shift that took place in the 1970s, as America transitioned from the liberalism of the New Deal era to the conservatism of the Reagan revolution. And second, he assumes that culture is just as important as economics in the constructions of and understandings of social class. Cowie engages the reader in a fascinating look at popular culture to reveal the ways in which a coherent white, working-class male identity fell apart, a process that contributed to the overall decline in organized labor’s power…

From Erica's list on culture’s role in shaping race, class, and gender in modern America.