I’m almost done working on Southern Discomfort though I’m still waiting on the cover art (and once I run it through the Draft2Digital ebook processor I’ll probably have to make format changes). However I wanted to start a running feature talking about books I used for research or that provide added information about the 1973 setting, the British folklore and similar stuff. I’d planned to include a bibliography at the end of the novel but you know what? It’s already 94,000 words and I want to be done with it. Posting online is better. This week, two books about the 1970s. And some unrelated 1970s movie imagery.
I read SOMETHING HAPPENED: A Political and Cultural History of the Seventies by Edward D. Berkowitz and reread it recently, or more precisely re-skimmed it. Partly that’s because Berkowitz is writing for an audience for whom the decade is history (fair enough) but also because his style is so stiff, reading closely is like chewing through cotton wool.
That said, Berkowitz does a good job looking at how, contrary to lots of stereotypes about the decade and how everyone got selfish and shallow, wore leisure suits and went disco-dancing, there was a lot going on: Watergate, some amazing movies (curiously he doesn’t mention Star Wars or blacksploitation), feminism, the oil crisis, stagflation (stagnating wages coupled with inflation, something supposedly impossible), busing kids to integrate schools (one of the least popular tactics), Vietnam and anti-war protests and more. I will also give him points for acknowledging that while lots of stuff changed in the 1970s, that’s true of every decade. I do however disagree with some of his interpretations (Jaws as a metaphor for Scary Immigrants, the drop in the birth rate being a sign we were losing our optimism). And as with Halberstam’s The Fifties, I notice there’s plenty of stuff he doesn’t cover like the constant terrorist bombings early in the decade.
As Southern Discomfort takes place in the middle of the Watergate scandal, I picked up and reread WATERGATE: The Full Inside Story by Lewis Chester, Cat McCrystal, Stephen Aris and William Shawcross (all from the London Sunday Times) for the first time since the scandal was front-page news. This 1973 book does an excellent job showing the Watergate break-in was the tip of an iceberg of dirty tricks, illicit payments, lawbreaking and lies as Nixon worked to secure re-election and destroy or at least humiliate his enemies (his keeping an “enemies list” of people he wanted revenge on seems depressingly familiar now). Obviously it came out before the whole story was known—no reference to Deep Throat—but still a good job. However I’m surprised how positive a picture it paints of FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover whose own many misdeeds had been exposed a couple of years earlier.
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