Hoberman, J.

The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties

New York, NY: The New Press, 2003. First Printing. Hardcover. “In ‘The Dream Life,’ J. Hoberman (b. 1948) has produced a major new cultural history of the 1960s—a brilliant, polymath and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one….The ‘purest power in America,’ film historian David Thomson once observed, is the fantasy of having one’s fantasy realized onscreen—and hence played in a hundred million minds. During this period, this fantasy was contagious. Movie stars made political statements; delusions contaminated and even supplanted reality in Indochina, Watts, Haight-Ashbury, and Washington, D.C. By the summer of 1969, Americans were living in a moment of antithetical, competing scenarios — a virtual civil war.” Let’s rewind the tape on that last sentence. “By the summer of 1969,” — a poignant section of the “The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties” front flap copy begins, “ — “Americans were living in a moment of antithetical, competing scenarios—a virtual civil war.” Sound familiar? At any rate, the acclaimed film critic & cultural historian J. Hoberman (born James Lewis Hoberman) uses a ‘cinematographically-informed’ lens to probe what he terms “the hidden political history of 60s cinema.” He intersperses these explicitly film-centric, art-critically informed readings of America (as it existed [culturally, politically, & sociologically] during that time) with “meditations on the personae of Che Guevara, John Wayne, Patty Hearst, Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, and against the pageantry of four national elections — 1960 to 1972” —and “the formation of America’s spectacular, mass-mediated politics.” Hoberman here announces himself as capable and credentialed, both, as the biographical blurb-notation on the dust-jacket’s rear flap (at interior) helpfully relays. “J. HOBERMAN is a senior film critic at ‘The Village Voice, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and other publications,” — and as if these journalistic jewels-on-one’s-resume weren’t enough, Hoberman is further distinguished by having taught at Harvard & NYU among other venerable, legacy institutions with which he has, at one time or another, been integrally involved. It is no surprise, then, that this inventive and original history of the 1960s—perfect for the cinephile in your life [even if that’s you!] is so pronouncedly worthwhile. [ISBN: 1-56584-763-6]. Hardcover in unclipped dust-jacket: First Edition, though not explicated as such on copyright page; First Printing, as indicated by number sequence thereon. Book in strong fine condition with only minute-to-minor shelf-wear, light bumping to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine; slight-to-moderate age-toning, yellowing to topmost fine-edges of front, back covers & spine-edge of same; else pristine. Dust-jacket in fine condition with only minute-to-minor shelf-wear & a few hushed pronouncements of bumping & closed chipping to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine, otherwise quite clean. Fine / Fine. [Item #5401]

Price: $25.00