|
"A pissed off Sarah Vowell...Part memoir, part cultural history, part political satire, all original."
- PopMatters |
"An indexer's effing nightmare."
- SubtleTea "We trust her like we trusted our favorite bands in high school." - Grist Journal |
sibling rivalry press, 2016Watch trailer. |
Megan Volpert's 1976 plucks the deepest chords of America's Bicentennial year. It exposes the guts of our country's political, historical, and cultural machine in a prose that matches the rhythms of horror, joy, and sheer madness in our national psyche. This is as original, inventive, and fresh a book as any historian or novelist of note has written about the U.S. A juggernaut of improbability and inevitability, her vision of America rolls in simultaneously from the past and the future, with a posse of grand ghosts, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford (and his dog Liberty), Howard Hughes, Gore Vidal, and Sid Vicious. The author is yet to be born in 1976, and thus, ideally poised to survey the past-future from her perch in the prenatal immensity from which she will emerge. Her brilliant saga is driven by the music that never stops rocking the North American continent, and, in an essential way, births her. Volpert is heir to Whitman, Hunter S. Thompson, and the Ramones who, unbeknownst to themselves, will appear in 1976--a book that heralds a grand new genre.
- Andrei Codrescu is an author and Peabody Award-winner for the film Road Scholar, a journey into post-Kerouac America. Taking swings at both the right and the left, and sometimes swings just for the fun of it, Volpert is a muscular voice of reason, a citizen intensely devoted to saddling up on the America we were for the minute between Nixon and Reagan. If she weren’t so raw and honest about what’s down in the abyss, she’d be damn near electable. And she has fine taste in music, too.
- Jim Hightower is a syndicated columnist, populist activist and author of the New York Times bestseller Thieves in High Places. |
