I was eight years old when the 1970s started and my abiding memories of the decade revolve around Raleigh Chopper bikes, glam rock and Monty Python. There are plenty of books which indulge such fluffy nostalgia but this isn’t one of them. Francis Wheen uses the theme of paranoia as the departure point for a walk around the dark side of the seventies.

Wheen is an amiable tour guide to a wide range of sinister scenarios and characters: Richard Nixon - a president so paranoid he bugged his own conversations; the FBI and CIA operating as secret police forces against their citizens in order to safeguard the land of the free; terrorist groups determined to liberate people from their ‘false consciousness’ by blowing them up; Britain having a collective nervous breakdown and, of course, the curious case of Rupert Bear’s penis (otherwise known as the Oz trial).

Wheen’s contention that the 1970s was the decade in which paranoia became generalised throughout society is debatable. What were the thousands of people persecuted by the McCarthy witch-hunts of the late forties and 1950s if not the victims of a paranoia run rampant through the body politic? Nonetheless, this is a compulsively readable book that is simultaneously unsettling and entertaining. It certainly proves that the old countercultural adage ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean the government isn’t out to get you’ was nothing more than the plain truth.

Most disturbing is the thought the reader (this reader, anyway) is left with that the nightmarish, dangerously unstable, crisis-ridden and deranged world portrayed in this book looks less like the last century than a parallel present. ( )

Seeing this from the British side of the pond, I found it an interesting read - if not as funny as the jacket blurbs suggested.

The seventies were my teenage years and things like 3-day weeks and power cuts early in the decade were just a backdrop to life - my mind was on other things. The crazier, almost psychotic side of USA politics he describes passed me by, though I was certainly aware of the Watergate skullduggery.

I was also intrigued to read the reviews from those to young to have experienced the 70s in some way, as I did wonder what my daughters would make of it without a bit of pre-knowledge of the personalities who figure in the anecdotes. ( )

Enjoyed this book, but not really sure he relates his premise very well. The book is supposed to be a collection of tales from the 70's illustrating the paranoia of the times. Some of the stories do relate to paranoia, but a lot of them don't. Still interesting reading, but don't think he really tied the tales together very well in support of his theme. ( )

The title says it all: I knew Philip K. Dick was a big paranoiac back in the day. I had no idea how representative he was of general culture across the Anglophone world in the 1970s. Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed paints a shockingly clear picture of a badly-dressed and even worse-wallpapered era.

The 70s: I was born then, and almost halfway into the decade, so while I grew up amid the detritus of that decade, I never formed a clear picture of it as anything but the time before the 80s. As Wheen writes near the end of the book, "If the 1960s were a wild weekend and the 1980s a hectic day at the office, the 1970s were a long Sunday evening in winter, with cold leftovers for supper and a power cut expected at any moment."

This book, basically, blew my mind.

To read the rest of the review, see here. ( )

I was born in the 1970's in the US, so most of the players in Strange Days Indeed were strange to me. However, reading against a backdrop of Glen Beck and Fox News, the burgeoning Tea Party movement, two mis-managed wars, the USA Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, torture, and secret CIA prisons and no-warrant NSA wiretapping, I found much of the paranoia to be rather quaint. I was disappointed that Wheen left it until the very last chapter to tie any of the 70's paranoia to the paranoia of today. ( )