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Book Review
| Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. By Sam Binkley. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. xii, 296 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3973-1. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3989-2.)
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| The hippie and the yuppie seem to have little in common. If anything, the yuppie of the 1980s can be seen as an outright rejection of the 1960s hippie, a turn away from the idealism of the yuppie's own youth. Sam Binkley details the passage from hippie to yuppie, finding a surprising continuity between the two identities. That continuity lies in the "loose" life-style and concurrently loosened self encouraged by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s but spreading, throughout the 1970s, into the American mainstream. By the 1980s, this emphasis on the loosened self was incorporated into the business world and transformed into the consumption-driven self-centeredness of the yuppie. For Binkley, the distinctly modern project of the loosening of the self has become "essential to the development of much of what we take for granted in ourselves today" (p. 249). |
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