No Direction Home

“[An] exemplary and richly suggestive work. . . . This is a powerful book on how the multiple traumas of the 1970s reshaped how Americans looked at themselves and the world.” — The Journal of American History

“Provides a useful introduction to major themes of the decade. . . . An intelligent, subtle, and well-researched work on a complex and significant part of recent US history.” — CHOICE

“Should serve as a model for future scholarly inquiry.” — Journal of Southern History

“Natasha Zaretsky’s book is a tour de force that marshals sociology, economics, and psychology to explain how Americans, once sure of their destiny, plunged in the 1970s into a profound pessimism not only about their place in the world, but also about the integrity of their own institutions — from the government in Washington to the home and hearth. This pessimism — combining a sense of national peril with a fear of moral and personal decline — gave rise to the Republican realignment of the 1980s and underlay the conservative revival after September 11, 2001. Anyone who wants to understand the politics of the last three decades needs to read Zaretsky’s startlingly original book.” — John B. Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic and author of The Folly of Empire

“Zaretsky draws on an imaginative range of sources, both published and archival, to discuss the changing American family during the 1970s. The book emerges as the best commentary I know about the family during this period.” — Peter N. Carroll, author of It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s

“No Direction Home offers a powerful and richly original analysis of American culture in the 1970s. Zaretsky’s brilliant insights into this misunderstood decade provide a compelling argument demonstrating how anxieties about national decline were expressed through anxieties about familial decline.” — Judith E. Smith, University of Massachusetts-Boston

“Rich and compelling. . . . No Direction Home will find its way to bookstore shelves, journalist and pundit desks, and course syllabi for many students.” — Peace and Change

“Inventively untangles a skein of cultural imagery that depicted the nation in terms of a family in peril — a crisis of literal and symbolic fatherlessness — and materialized in such disparate realms as the panic over dependency on Arab oil, the debate over Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and emotions associated with the return of America’s prisoners of War from Vietnam.” — Rick Perlstein, The Nation