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Peter Carlson
If you judge a book by how many exclamation points you scrawl in the margins, Strange Days Indeed is a masterpiece indeed, a mind-blowing work of nonfiction black humor…Wheen doesn't explain what, if anything, all this madness means, but somehow that didn't bother me, perhaps because his anecdotes are so jaw-droppingly delicious…we need Francis Wheen to keep reminding us that humans are a loony species and that much of history is a record of the various forms of lunacy arising in different eras. I suggest that some great university endow a Distinguished Chair of Paranoia Studies and invite Wheen to sit in it while he continues his delightfully hilarious and frighteningly serious work.—The Washington Post
Overview
The 1970s were a theme park of mass paranoia. Strange Days Indeed tells the story of the decade when a distinctive “paranoid style” emerged and seemed to infect all areas of both private and public life, from high politics to pop culture. The sense of paranoia that had long fuelled the conspiracy theories of fringe political groups then somehow became the norm for millions of ordinary people. And to make it even trickier, a certain amount of that paranoia was justified. Watergate showed that the governments ...