Killen's free-associative book is smart and insightful, but at times succumbs to grandiosity, trying too hard to turn disparate phenomena into representative tropes. He argues that "the preoccupation with air travel and its risks that overtook the nation in 1973 reflected anxieties about the larger catastrophes overtaking the American ship of state." He contends that Watergate (and Nixon's White House tapes) and America's first reality show An American Family (starring the Louds) "aroused anxieties about the hollowing out of private space" and "sounded the alarm about the break-down of traditional authority."
As for Decade of Nightmares, it is a much more ponderous production, dutifully sifting the many events, foreign and domestic, that helped shape the disappointing US presidency of Jimmy Carter, and dutifully looking at the many factors (demographic, social and religious) that helped set the stage for the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and Republican conservatism. Unfortunately, the book is peppered with gross generalizations and hyperbolic
assertions that undermine Jenkins' more considered assessments.
For instance, he writes almost hysterically of growing worries in the 1970s about serial murderers, child abuse, pornography and Satanism: "The generation that came of age in the late 1960s was now prepared to believe that America was under assault from armies of faceless nightmare figures."
What both Decade of Nightmares and 1973 Nervous Breakdown very clearly do is leave the reader with a palpable sense of how the legacy of the 1970s reverberates to this day in the US.
Killen reminds us that today's media-mediated, celebrity-centric culture was anticipated by Andy Warhol and the campy, self-conscious art that was created during the 1970s in reaction to the values of sincerity and authenticity enshrined by the 1960s Jenkins not only emphasizes similarities "between the economic situation then and the one that exists now" -- namely, serious deficits, lax fiscal discipline, rising energy prices and high spending on defense and national security -- but also underscores similarities in the Manichean language employed by both the Reagan and US President George W. Bush administrations.
Such observations point up the long shadow cast by the 1970s and defy the wishful thinking of the Doonesbury character who said of that "kidney stone of a decade": "This, too, will pass."
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