Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
(Harper, $30)
Los Angeles deserves more credit for irreversibly reshaping American culture in the wake of the 1960s, said John Young in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Journalist Ron Brownstein argues that 1974 was the year when the city reached its apogee as a creative force, and his new book “gives L.A. and the moment a gauzy glow.” We see Norman Lear and All in the Family “drag television away from vapid escapism.” We see Chinatown and The Godfather: Part II canonize the public’s emerging distrust in institutions. We hear the Eagles push polished jangly guitar rock to the top of the charts. There are many strands of the story to highlight and interweave, and “Brownstein manages this deftly.”
The effects of this particular cultural revolution are “still with us, for better or worse,” said Frank Gannon in The Wall Street Journal. But Brownstein is probably right that we’ve been better off since 1970s L.A. taught us to be more suspicious of authority, more accepting of premarital sex, and more sensitive to women’s rights. While building his argument, the veteran scribe “makes all this cultural history memorable by telling much of his story through profiles.” Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty get star turns, as do Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and CBS executive Robert Wood, who stacked All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show in a killer lineup. Even in that company, though,