Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
Starred Review. 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 filmTriumph of the Willto Busby Berkeley musicals andGone with the Windto 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.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.