Dancing in the Dark

Starred review from July 13, 2009
The gloom of the Depression fed a brilliant cultural efflorescence that's trenchantly explored here. Dickstein (Gates of Eden
), a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, surveys a panorama that includes high-brow masterpieces and mass entertainments, grim proletarian novels and frothy screwball comedies, haunting photographs of dust bowl poverty and elegant art deco designs. He finds the scene a jumble of fertile contradictions—between outward-looking naturalism and introspective modernism, social consciousness and giddy escapism, a hard-boiled, increasingly desperate individualism and a new vision of singing, dancing, collective solidarity—which somehow cohered into “extraordinary attempts to cheer people up—or else to sober them up.” Dickstein's fluent, erudite, intriguing meditations turn up many resonances, comparing, for example, the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will
to Busby Berkeley musicals and Gone with the Wind
to gangster films. While tracing the social meanings of culture, he stays raptly alive to its aesthetic pleasures, like the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers collaboration, which expressed “the inner radiance that was one true bastion against social suffering.” The result is a fascinating portrait of a distant era that still speaks compellingly to our own. 24 illus.

Starred review from July 1, 2009
Just in time for our own era's economic collapse, a literary critic looks back at the unusually rich art of the 1930s.

In this scholarly yet immensely readable study, Dickstein (English/CUNY; A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature in the Real World, 2005, etc.) examines how the artistic culture of the'30s served a dual function. It helped people understand and cope with the terrible economic climate, and it allowed them to escape, for a while at least, the burden of dark times. The books, music, photos, movies, plays and dances of the period both reflected and influenced the decade's unique state of mind. These wide-ranging works of art include the novels of John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Henry Roth, and the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans, which turned an unprecedented spotlight on America's poor and disenfranchised. Artists like Nathanael West, James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald"emphasize[d] the limitations and distortions of the American Dream," even as Cagney's gangster films and Busby Berkeley's backstage musicals reinvented rags-to-riches fantasies. At a time when audiences made room simultaneously for social relevance and artistic escape, singers as disparate as Bing Crosby and Woody Guthrie had a place. The big bands of Ellington and Goodman, the romantic comedies of Hawks and Capra, the dancing of Astaire and Rogers and the music of Porter and Gershwin all supplied a touch of class for the masses. Whether discussing Citizen Kane or Porgy and Bess, the poetry of Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams or Robert Frost, Faulkner's unique achievement and odd relation to the period, the films of Cary Grant or the elegance and energy of Art Deco, Dickstein always has something smart and lively to say. His scintillating commentary illuminates an important dimension of a decade too often considered only in political or economic terms.

It's hard to imagine a more astute, more graceful guide to a remarkably creative period.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 15, 2009
Dickstein (English & theater, CUNY Graduate Ctr.; "A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World") has written an extremely thorough cultural history of the Great Depression, primarily through analysis of the literature and film of the period. Chapters on different aspects of 1930s culture (as well as earlier significant works and cultural trends that informed Depression culture) provide detailed insights into the historical significance of a multitude of specific works of importance. Dickstein covers both well-known and more obscure works and draws interesting parallels between the Great Depression and today's economic situation. Background on the plots of films and books makes up a significant portion of each chapter, which is useful for readers unfamiliar with all the works covered or specialists in need of a refresher but can make readers feel they have a lot of material to plow through. VERDICT This book will be especially valuable for undergraduates new to cultural history of the era and will also be appreciated by general readers interested in the period. While much will be familiar to scholars, they may also appreciate it as an overview.Madeline Mundt, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2009
In this broad-ranging history of the U.S. in the 1930s, Dickstein focuses not on headline-dominating economic issues but on the creative responses of artists and authors to the eras upheavals, both actual and potential. Film came of age during these hard times and became a chief focus of peoples despair and hope. Gangster films helped sublimate anger and rebellion, and musicals, especially Busby Berkeleys extravaganzas, created a fantasy world of pulchritude and glamour available to anyone with the price of admission. Writers such as Fitzgerald and dramatists on the order of Odets offered their own analyses of the decades social stresses. Ellington and other jazz and big-band greats composed the ages theme songs. Dickstein looks beyond the mainstream to the nations minorities, whose powerlessness made economic hardships even harder to bear, and he details the contributions of African Americans and immigrant Jews to American culture. Parallels to contemporary economic conditions mark this as an exceptionally relevant book. Extensive bibliography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)