| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966. By Kirse Granat May. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii, 243 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2695-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5362-3.)

Kirse Granat May's Golden State, Golden Youth belongs to that area of popular culture analysis most appropriately termed 'image study.' Specifically, she emphasizes the ways in which works of popular culture have constructed a pointed and often mythic representation of California. Centering on a key period (1955-1966) in which an affirmative image of California was promoted in popular consciousness, her study ranges over such items as popular press advertisements and articles about California, Disney synergistic culture (the cross-promotion of the Disneyland theme park with television shows such as Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club), the Gidget phenomenon in novels, films, and television, beach party movies, and the California sound in rock music (for example, Jan & Dean, the Beach Boys). Those and similar works established California as an enviable site of youthful exuberance and apolitical absorption in hedonistic pursuit of bodily pleasure (but a pleasure always framed by a morality of innocence and purity). Such popular culture reworked a previous image of America's youth--one that had culminated in the 1955 film Rebel without a Cause--as maladjusted, rebellious, and critical of mainstream values. In the mid-1950s, there was a concerted effort to revise the negative image of California and to reestablish it as normal--the norm, precisely, of middle-American propriety and cultural aspiration. . . .

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