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The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies
In the sixties, as the nation anticipated the conquest of space, the defeat of poverty, and an end to injustice at home and abroad, no goal seemed beyond America’s reach. Then the seventies arrived—bringing oil shocks and gas lines, the disgrace and resignation of a president, defeat in Vietnam, terrorism at the 1972 Munich Olympics, urban squalor, bizarre crimes, high prices, and a bad economy. The country fell into a great funk. But when things fall apart, you can take the fragments and make something fresh. Avocado kitchens and Earth Shoes may have been ugly, but they signaled new modes of seeing and being. The first generation to see Earth from space found ways to make life’s everyday routines—eating, keeping warm, taking out the trash—meaningful, both personally and globally. And many decided to reinvent themselves. In Populuxe , a “textbook of consumerism in the Push Button Age” (Alan J. Adler, Los Angeles Times ), Thomas Hine scrutinized the looks and life of the 1950s and 1960s, revealing the hopes and fears expressed in that era’s design. In the same way, The Great Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies maps a complex era by looking at its ideas, feelings, sex, fashions, textures, gestures, colors, demographic forces, artistic expressions, and other phenomena that shaped our lives. Hine gets into the shoes and heads of those who experienced the seventies—exploring their homes, feeling the beat of their music, and scanning the ads that incited their desires. But The Great Funk is more than a lavish catalogue of seventies it’s a smart, informed, lively look at the “Me decade” through the eyes of the man House & Garden called “America’s sharpest design critic.”
256 pages, Hardcover
First published November 13, 2007
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89 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Hine
10 books5 followersThomas Hine is a writer on history, culture and design. He is the author of five books, and he contributes frequently to magazines, including The Magazine Antiques, Philadelphia Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Martha Stewart Living, Architectural Record and others. He is a senior contributing writer to Home Miami and Home Fort Lauderdale.
He has been praised in the New Yorker by John Updike for his "mischievously alert sensibility, and was recently cited by House & Garden as "America's sharpest design critic." Populuxe--a word he coined as the title of his first book to describe the styles and enthusiasms of post-World War II America, has entered the language and is now included in the American Heritage and Random House dictionaries.
From 1973 until 1996, he was the architecture and design critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1977 and 1978, he was a Ford Foundation fellow, traveling in Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union and elsewhere to study the impact of rapid political change on architecture and planning.
Recently, he was guest curator of Promises of Paradise, a groundbreaking exhibition on the design of post World War II South Florida. He also was an adviser to the Orange County Museum Art on its 2007-2009 touring exhibition Birth of the Cool and wrote an essay for its highly-praised, award-winning catalogue. Earlier, he was guest curator for the Denver Art Museum touring exhibition US Design: 1975-2000. He also wrote one of the essays in its catalogue. He worked with the National Building Museum on On the Job, a 2001 exhibition and catalogue about offices, and with the Fairmount Park Art Association on its New Landmarks exhibition and catalogue, which explored a new approach to public art. In 1989, he was an advisor to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on its exhibition, Landmarks for Modern Living, about the post World War II Case Study House program, and he contributed an essay to its prize-winning catalogue.
Other books to which he has contributed chapters include Volare(1999) and Material Man (2000),both created by the Fashion Engineering Unit of Florence Italy, and Life: A Century of Change (2000).
He has taught courses at both the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. He has lectured at Yale, Syracuse, Drexel, and Michigan State Universities; museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum; and to professional and trade associations including the American Institute of Architects and the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association.
He was born in suburban Boston, grew up in Connecticut, and graduated from Yale. He has lived in Philadelphia since 1970.
He has been praised in the New Yorker by John Updike for his "mischievously alert sensibility, and was recently cited by House & Garden as "America's sharpest design critic." Populuxe--a word he coined as the title of his first book to describe the styles and enthusiasms of post-World War II America, has entered the language and is now included in the American Heritage and Random House dictionaries.
From 1973 until 1996, he was the architecture and design critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1977 and 1978, he was a Ford Foundation fellow, traveling in Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union and elsewhere to study the impact of rapid political change on architecture and planning.
Recently, he was guest curator of Promises of Paradise, a groundbreaking exhibition on the design of post World War II South Florida. He also was an adviser to the Orange County Museum Art on its 2007-2009 touring exhibition Birth of the Cool and wrote an essay for its highly-praised, award-winning catalogue. Earlier, he was guest curator for the Denver Art Museum touring exhibition US Design: 1975-2000. He also wrote one of the essays in its catalogue. He worked with the National Building Museum on On the Job, a 2001 exhibition and catalogue about offices, and with the Fairmount Park Art Association on its New Landmarks exhibition and catalogue, which explored a new approach to public art. In 1989, he was an advisor to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on its exhibition, Landmarks for Modern Living, about the post World War II Case Study House program, and he contributed an essay to its prize-winning catalogue.
Other books to which he has contributed chapters include Volare(1999) and Material Man (2000),both created by the Fashion Engineering Unit of Florence Italy, and Life: A Century of Change (2000).
He has taught courses at both the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. He has lectured at Yale, Syracuse, Drexel, and Michigan State Universities; museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum; and to professional and trade associations including the American Institute of Architects and the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association.
He was born in suburban Boston, grew up in Connecticut, and graduated from Yale. He has lived in Philadelphia since 1970.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 26, 2025
"If you wanted a world that was orderly, where progress was guaranteed, the seventies were a terrible time to be alive. Cars were running out of gas. The country was running out of promise. A president was being run out of office. American troops were running out of Vietnam. [.] During the seventies it seemed that the United States couldn't do anything right. The country had fallen into The Great Funk." -- on page 3
So begins The Great Funk by author Hine - who, unusually, is not a historian or sociologist by training, but a former architecture and design critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper - and the initial chapters are sort of slow-going and downbeat, and overuses the title as a punchline of sorts for the decade's bad times and/or ideas. However, it rebounds nicely about a third of the way through - notably, after an overbaked section on architecture 🤨 - and settles into a more agreeable groove. At only 225 pages, it is not a comprehensive look at the 1970's, but it was not meant to be. While there are the expected sections on fashion (with a multitude of full-color photos), disco, and the gas crisis, Hine gets increasingly better mileage with thoughtful discourses on topics like feminism, gay rights, 'stagflation,' the dawn of the home computer era, and the effect of Baby Boomers entering the workforce in record numbers. While the cover art - a young lass frolicking in plaid bell-bottoms and platform shoes next to a pre-explosion Ford Pinto - may suggest a gee-whiz romp through the 'Me decade,' it actually reaches a bit deeper, and nimbly delivers us directly into the start of the 80's.
So begins The Great Funk by author Hine - who, unusually, is not a historian or sociologist by training, but a former architecture and design critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper - and the initial chapters are sort of slow-going and downbeat, and overuses the title as a punchline of sorts for the decade's bad times and/or ideas. However, it rebounds nicely about a third of the way through - notably, after an overbaked section on architecture 🤨 - and settles into a more agreeable groove. At only 225 pages, it is not a comprehensive look at the 1970's, but it was not meant to be. While there are the expected sections on fashion (with a multitude of full-color photos), disco, and the gas crisis, Hine gets increasingly better mileage with thoughtful discourses on topics like feminism, gay rights, 'stagflation,' the dawn of the home computer era, and the effect of Baby Boomers entering the workforce in record numbers. While the cover art - a young lass frolicking in plaid bell-bottoms and platform shoes next to a pre-explosion Ford Pinto - may suggest a gee-whiz romp through the 'Me decade,' it actually reaches a bit deeper, and nimbly delivers us directly into the start of the 80's.
September 23, 2009
Thomas Hine achieves his goal of "an attempt to evoke an era" but not much else in this survey of the period 1969-1981. Mostly he moves from descriptions of cultural trends and a few moments important to aging baby boomers, without much else. A veteran journalist, Hine is good on the details, but short on the argument. As a result, the book reads like an extended People magazine special issue.
Hines ignores such cultural trends as rap music (and culture), punk, and comix, to name a few things, and fails to say anything substantive except how the decade was awful, but not really. Well, perhaps inadvertantly he related one interesting thing, from Buckminster Fuller: "Fuller believed that people have an exalted role: to be a counterforce to entropy, the increasing disorder of the universe. Just as humans learned to sail against the wind, he said, we can find ways to do more with less, create order, and apply intelligence to the physical world." (p. 53). Hine dismisses Fuller (wrongly) as a "freestyle blowhard" and moves on from the themes that Fuller raised to a chapter on "consciousness-raising," which he also describes as "an embarassment." So much self-loathing here!
It bores me to write about this book, as I have just begun reading Jeff Gordinier's X SAVES THE WORLD, about Generation X. Gordinier begins by describing the myopic world view of baby boomers, of which THE GREAT FUNK should be Exhibit A. If you like a lot of pretty pictures and nostalgia, check out the Funk. If you want something with teeth, skip it.
*
WHY I READ THIS BOOK: I was attracted by a review when the hardcover came out a couple years ago, and saw it for a few bucks on a recent trip to Powell's in Portland. It had more text than I expected, and based on the first few pages, seemed to hold more promise than it eventually would.
Hines ignores such cultural trends as rap music (and culture), punk, and comix, to name a few things, and fails to say anything substantive except how the decade was awful, but not really. Well, perhaps inadvertantly he related one interesting thing, from Buckminster Fuller: "Fuller believed that people have an exalted role: to be a counterforce to entropy, the increasing disorder of the universe. Just as humans learned to sail against the wind, he said, we can find ways to do more with less, create order, and apply intelligence to the physical world." (p. 53). Hine dismisses Fuller (wrongly) as a "freestyle blowhard" and moves on from the themes that Fuller raised to a chapter on "consciousness-raising," which he also describes as "an embarassment." So much self-loathing here!
It bores me to write about this book, as I have just begun reading Jeff Gordinier's X SAVES THE WORLD, about Generation X. Gordinier begins by describing the myopic world view of baby boomers, of which THE GREAT FUNK should be Exhibit A. If you like a lot of pretty pictures and nostalgia, check out the Funk. If you want something with teeth, skip it.
*
WHY I READ THIS BOOK: I was attracted by a review when the hardcover came out a couple years ago, and saw it for a few bucks on a recent trip to Powell's in Portland. It had more text than I expected, and based on the first few pages, seemed to hold more promise than it eventually would.
February 1, 2008
I admit it - I love the 70's. I love the clothes, the music, the hair, the cars, the tv shows - everything. I guess it's because I grew up then, but how can you not smile at the thought of red plaid bell bottom pants? (Yes, I had a pair myself.) This book celebrates the design of the 70's but also the changing cultural norms, politics, and society. It was all about texture apparently. The book goes into areas such as the evolving work place, home decor, the rise of houseplants, and much more. This guy also wrote a book called "Populuxe" which did the same sort of review of the years 1954-64 - I need to track that down. This was definitely a great read.
September 26, 2019
4.5 because some of the cause-and-effect analysis is specious (arguing films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist represent contemporary issues with children ignores, for instance, lots of older films such as Village of the Damned and the Bad Seed).
Hine argues that 1970s was shaped by failure: America's post-WW II ever-growing economy was floundering, the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s was floundering, our leadership clearly didn't know what they were doing. But if the system, didn't work, why not try something new? And so we got new styles and fashions, new trends in music and TV, offbeat and androgynous personal styles and hair and new ways of doing things (environmentalism, for example).
In contrast to Edward Berkowitz' "Something Happened" which is dryer, more clinical and more focused on politics, Hine focuses more on feelings, styles and trends. But as someone who was a teenager back then, I think he catches a lot of what the decade felt like to me, constantly beleaguered but still optimistic. I like the book a lot.
Hine argues that 1970s was shaped by failure: America's post-WW II ever-growing economy was floundering, the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s was floundering, our leadership clearly didn't know what they were doing. But if the system, didn't work, why not try something new? And so we got new styles and fashions, new trends in music and TV, offbeat and androgynous personal styles and hair and new ways of doing things (environmentalism, for example).
In contrast to Edward Berkowitz' "Something Happened" which is dryer, more clinical and more focused on politics, Hine focuses more on feelings, styles and trends. But as someone who was a teenager back then, I think he catches a lot of what the decade felt like to me, constantly beleaguered but still optimistic. I like the book a lot.
February 16, 2021
You would think that with a title like The Great Funk, the book would be a cheap shot at the 1970's. Instead the book is a really well done study of the post-Vietnam, Watergate, oi-embargo, disco period of American history. The author has done his research and the book is really interesting. This is one of those books that if you come across it at a bookstore or in a library, you should pick it up.
August 10, 2018
Decent book, but I often felt that the author was more interested in pushing and justifying his catch phrase “The Great Funk” than telling the story of the 1970s. That said, there were many lesser known events and cultural nuances covered that often gave the book a very 70s feel.
June 14, 2018
#37 of 120 books pledged to read during 2018
May 26, 2011
In the seventies, the United States "fell into a great funk. But when things fall apart you can take the fragments and make something fresh. . . . Despair at the old way of doing things gave license to try new things. . . . To live in the seventies was to live in a fallen world, one of promises broken and trust betrayed. . . . The failure of old formulas created an atmosphere of freedom, a sense of possibility that produced everything from the personal computer to the discotheque. That freedom wasn't a mistake; it was simply exhausting. That's why, in 1981, Americans reached back in time to old, simple messages and pretended to believe them. Instead of indulging in nostalgia, we might, in the spirit of the seventies, sift through all the wreckage of the past and find things that are useful in our own time. We might look for ideas and artifacts that embody views of the world and of life that might serve us better than those we now take for granted. We might learn again to appreciate how the failure of the purportedly wise opens the door for the freedom of the many."
DOES IT REALLY? IS THIS STILL TRUE? WHAT IF THE PURPORTEDLY WISE NEVER RECOGNIZE THEIR OWN FAILURES AND MISTAKES?
"We might feel exhilarated at living in a world full of problems that, maybe, we can solve. We might be dissatisfied. And we might do something about it, right now."
RIGHT NOW? In 2011 folks are poorer than they were in the seventies, many are losing homes and jobs, lobbyists control most politicians, lies are proclaimed like mantras, innocence is gone. Is Hine talking about the seventies or the present?
It's 1971/2011. The GREAT FUNK(adelic) is back. America Eats Its Young -- it all falls apart. One Nation Under a Groove -- let's all come together.
OCCUPY WALL STREET!!!
DOES IT REALLY? IS THIS STILL TRUE? WHAT IF THE PURPORTEDLY WISE NEVER RECOGNIZE THEIR OWN FAILURES AND MISTAKES?
"We might feel exhilarated at living in a world full of problems that, maybe, we can solve. We might be dissatisfied. And we might do something about it, right now."
RIGHT NOW? In 2011 folks are poorer than they were in the seventies, many are losing homes and jobs, lobbyists control most politicians, lies are proclaimed like mantras, innocence is gone. Is Hine talking about the seventies or the present?
It's 1971/2011. The GREAT FUNK(adelic) is back. America Eats Its Young -- it all falls apart. One Nation Under a Groove -- let's all come together.
OCCUPY WALL STREET!!!
Read
February 5, 2021A social history of the decade, with an emphasis on fashion and design. It was fun to read because of all the pictures. My daughter also enjoyed looking at all the pictures with me. The premise is probably too oversimplified to be deeply true, but I haven't read a better explanation of the 70s. People were depressed by shortages and world problems, so they began questioning the monolithic culture that had been handed down to them, and began going off in search of their own answers. Back to the land, ethnic clothes, alternative energy, Eastern religions, dome houses, earth tones, and shaggy, leafy interiors. Sexual experimentation, women's lib, gay rights, and so on. No, it wasn't a profound book, but it brought back a lot of memories from my childhood, and helped make sense of some things I had lived through without thinking about.
February 7, 2017
I have always been interested in the 1970s so it was fun to read about the fashion, the pet rock and other things that were popular in the 1970s. I particularly liked reading about the interior design of peoples houses. I am fond of avocado green.
October 29, 2012
Insightful and colorfully illustrated history of that decade we love to hate, the 70s. You knew about harvest gold and avocado appliances and disco; Hine gives you the cultural context that led here and it's a pleasure to read. I thought this stayed strong until the end, when he moved out of a conscientiously apolitical presentation into applicability to today--definitely worth a read.
November 28, 2014
Cassidy sent me this book all about the 70s. It was really enlightening to me, someone who was born in 1971, but didn't know much about the decade. I'm glad to know what was going on during my formative years. A good read with nice pictures.
March 29, 2008
its interesting at first but the writer starts to meander along the farther he gets into his subject. Also, he makes the mistake so many cultural historians do by assuming what was going on in New York and LA was going on in Omaha, Austin, and Columbus.
October 29, 2008
Hine's thesis is not so new: Schulman started it all with his book, The Seventies, BUT Hine brings a design perspective, which since it is the 70s, adds to all the weirdness. He tries to make sense of all the brown and orange.
August 18, 2008
To be honest, I felt like I was reading an old high school yearbook, although, unlike our high school yearbook, the words were all spelled correctly.
But nonetheless, lots of the trends he describes seemed just as likely to be media phenomenon as real developments in culture.
But nonetheless, lots of the trends he describes seemed just as likely to be media phenomenon as real developments in culture.
June 1, 2009
I grew up in the seventies (graduated from high school in 1977) so I was really able to relate to this book. I remember all the fads, the shortages, etc. Total nostalgia for me!
Can't believe the CB radio fad wasn't mentioned though.
Can't believe the CB radio fad wasn't mentioned though.
March 30, 2012
There should have been more and better pictures. Still it made me want to travel back in time to kick Phyllis Schlafly in the uterus and talk to my plants more. Really talk to them, you know? I also want wallpaper on my ceilings.
November 14, 2014
A fun description of how design in the 1970s reflected the events and mood of the times. The 70s were my school age years, so it was interesting to hear someone ascribe meaning to all the quirky pop culture elements of my childhood and adolescence.
August 3, 2014
I enjoyed Populuxe better than this retrospective of the 70's. A very shallow look at the decade, that really just reminded me of all that went wrong during that time.
October 17, 2014
Very interesting insight into the style, decor, and how the attitude of the 70's affected the everyday life of Americans. Good read.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews