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

In what the New York Times's A.O. Scott called a suave, scholarly tour de force, J. Hoberman delivers a brilliant and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one.

This was the era of the Missile Gap and the Space Race, the Black and Sexual Revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate--as well as the tele-saturation of the American market and the advent of Pop art. In elegant, epigrammatic prose, as Scott put it, Hoberman moves from the political histories of movies to the theater of wars, national political campaigns, and pop culture events.

With entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Shampoo), and meditations on personages from Che Guevara, John Wayne, and Patty Hearst to Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema and the formation of America's mass-mediated politics.

About author(s):J. Hoberman is the author, co-author, or editor of a dozen books, including the trilogy The Dream Life, An Army of Phantoms, and the forthcoming Found Illusions (all from The New Press) and Film After Film. He has written for Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books; contributes the On Video column for the New York Times; has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990; and was, for over thirty years, a film critic for the Village Voice. He lives in New York.