If the 1960s was the decade of peace, love and understanding, the 1970s was the decade of glitter and glam rock. Or was it?
Gerard DeGroot peels away the polyester to examine what really happened in a decade that began with the death of Jimi Hendrix and ended with Ronald Reagan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street.
As the Sixties chickens came home to roost, the Seventies became an era when dreams died, hope was thwarted, problems long ignored finally exploded, and optimism repeatedly crushed gave way to frustration.
Incisive, iconoclastic and hugely entertaining The Seventies Unplugged is popular history at its best. Gerard de Groot is a Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrew's, where he has taught since 1985. An American by birth, he came to Britain in 1980 to do a Ph.D. at Edinburgh University. He is the author of ten highly acclaimed books on twentieth-century history and has published widely in academic journals and in the popular press. His study of the atomic bomb, The Bomb: A Life, won the RUSI Westminster Medal, awarded in Britain to the best book published in the English language on a war or military topic, and The Sixties Unplugged, his acclaimed account of that dazzling decade, was published by Macmillan in 2008.
