'The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture' By Shelton Waldrep (ed.): (London: Routledge, 2000), 317 pp., £55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-41592-534-7, £13.99 (pbk), ISBN 0-41592-5355.

Were the 70s bad for your health? This is not a question that Shelton Waldrep's 'The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture' sets out to answer specifically. Nevertheless, the contributions to this anthology offer welcome diversions in various directions from the narrative uniformity of recent seventies movies, since 'Boogie Nights', '[Studio] 54' and 'The Last Days of Disco' recall not so much"the decade that style forgot" as the unsustainability of its cultural practices, their propensity for impelling acts of self-disintegration, and the welcome inevitability of the decade's end. Of course, all of this amounts to so much wishful thinking: 'a rite de passage' routinely enacted to displace the persistence of problematic practices -- such as pornography, drug-taking, homosexuality, even disco -- into a cultural past which is ripe for nostalgic contemplation and retro-chic marketing but otherwise best left behind.