Over Here: Criticizing America, 1968-1989

Over Here is a selection of witty and well written essays on American subjects from the late 1960s to the end of the 1980s. An informal chronicle of American letters and life, its topics range from serious fiction (by Joan Didion, John Updike, Robert Coover, Mary McCarthy, and others) and cultural criticism (by Diana Trilling, Marshall McLuhan, Robert Brustein, and Neil Postman) to "popular" phenomena like espionage and crime novels, television, sports, journalism, horror fiction, the Charles Manson case, and the writings of Tom Wolfe.

Beginning with close, skeptical readings of the terms in which life in contemporary America has been represented and explained, the book offers longer views of the difficult issues of America's recent past--Vietnam, sexual and social revolution, the drug scene, the career of Richard Nixon, political terrorism and the Cold War, the oil crises, Reaganism and the Roaring Eighties on Wall Street, the whole sad comedy of an American imperium that keeps betraying the democratic intentions it purports to serve. Yet in "criticizing America," Over Here asserts the value as well as the difficulty of being where and what we are.