Those were the day-to-days of our lives in the '80sBooks
The Times of the Eighties.
The Times of the Eighties
Edited by William Grimes
Black Dog & Leventhal, $35
What do we remember about the 1980s? It depends a bit on how old you were, and so, no doubt, does your attitude to the atmosphere and style of the period.
The '80s saw the rise of Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Empire and the Cold War; the political dominance of Reagan and Thatcher, and the economic liberalism that transformed the world under them. It saw the rise of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and computers, as well as the first flowering of Madonna and U2.
William Grimes has put together an attractive and useful coffee-table book with a lot of colour pics but also stacks of more-or-less enlightening and sometimes stylish words about the period of big hair, shoulder pads (there's an evocative image of Joan Collins) and the Russians in Afghanistan.
For those of us who were adults at the time, there are memories of the thrill of surprise when communism seeped out of Eastern Europe and when apartheid fell apart in South Africa. It's sobering to be reminded of the Iran Contra affair, the election of George Bush snr, the appointment of Colin Powell, the way Thatcher broke all records by winning three consecutive elections.
And inevitably there are the pieces about everything but politics. It's amazing to see a slender Donald Trump with a reasonable haircut described as an Adonis. It's fascinating to read Joyce Carol Oates' ode to Mike Tyson.
Arguably the finest piece in the book is a review by the literary critic Hugh Kenner of an '80s edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Englishman John Gross explains why Les Mis the musical is not as good as Victor Hugo's novel and lacks the merits of, say, the movie with Charles Laughton and Fredric March.
I like the piece about John Malkovich and Gary Sinise in the Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard's True West. And I enjoyed the obits of Orson Welles, Samuel Beckett, Princess Grace and Francois Truffaut.
Vincent Canby lists the films of the year, which include Scorsese's Raging Bull and Michael Cimino's flop Heaven's Gate. There's a piece about Pina Bausch (that singles out Meryl Tankard); an article by Martin Amis written in his early 30s about how the London literary world doesn't really exist and isn't glamorous; and one about Don DeLillo (pre-White Noise and Underworld), saying he makes a living but doesn't sell well.
More people will get off on the descriptions of Michael Jackson and lots of attention to Cher, Tina Turner, Kasparov, you name it.
Does the book have a function in the age of Google? Well, it looks good. It's consistently well written and it will furnish a room.