"Jefferson Cowie has written a wonderfully insightful book. His sophisticated reading of working-class culture is thoroughly grounded in the politics, partisanship, and political economy of 1970's America. It is a clichT-smasher that offers a new narrative of the American working class in a decade that saw incomes stagnate and the steel belt rust."ùNelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara<BR><BR>"Stayin' Alive is a brilliant, readable autopsy of 1960's liberalism. This is history from the bottom up without forgetting the way it all looked from the top. From the murder of Jock Yablonski to the dying strains of Springsteen's 'Born in the USA,' Cowie brilliantly explains how so many good people failed to keep the capitalism we know now from getting a pass."ùThomas Geoghegan, author of Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat an Its Back<BR><BR>An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, Stdyin' Alive is a wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade. Prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive bookùpart political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film, and TV loreùreveals America's fascinating and little understood path from the rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and deflated expectations of the present.<BR><BR>Stayin' Alive takes us from the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, connecting politics and culture, and showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the 1960s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. Cowie also makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of the George McGovern campaign, between radicalism and the blue-collar backlash, and between the earthy twang of Merle Haggard's country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever.<BR><BR>Stayin' Alive captures nothing less than the defining characteristics of a new eraùa history with profound relevance for our own time.