"The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies" by Thomas Hine (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Earth shoes, "Star Wars," Nixon, "Shaft," Patty Hearst, punk rock, pet rocks and the pill. Thomas Hine's latest pop-culture adventure, "The Great Funk," is a satisfying history that touches on all of those things. But it's even more fun as a photo album. The decade begins in the summer of 1969 with Woodstock and the Stonewall riots and ends 11 years later with Ronald Reagan and the release of the Iran hostages. It is a long period of "funk," which Hine defines as panic, stink, anarchy and improvisation. The picture-filled pages portray the '70s as a jumble of individual style, social movements and early technology. The Apple computer prototype resembles a homemade birdhouse; early porn looks quaint. But for each positive development (like the birth control pill, "Saturday Night Live" and gay pride), Hine reminds us of a negative (the Jonestown massacre, the oil crisis, Watergate and bathroom carpeting). Without too much sentimentality or nostalgia, "The Great Funk" entertainingly explores the complex identity of a decade that embraced the disco ball and the Honda Accord.
-- Caitlin Shamberg
"American Ruins" by Arthur Drooker (Merrell)
The Bethlehem Steel mill is an enormous edifice of metal pipes, silos and rusting staircases, a ruin out of a post-apocalyptic summer flop starring Kevin Costner. But the thing is in America -- in tranquil Pennsylvania, no less. Like the other structures in photographer Arthur Drooker's "American Ruins," which calls itself the first photography book to document America's historic ruins, the steel mill has been ravaged by time, but it's not beaten down. Here it is, 103 years old and still standing, and in Drooker's pictures -- shot with a custom digital camera that picks up infrared light and the closest details of damage -- it's magnificent. So too are the South's great antebellum mansions, even if all that's left of them are rows of Corinthian columns; ancient Native American missions overrun with brush; and Harper's Ferry's beautiful masonry piers, which once supported a bridge across the Potomac, a bridge no longer there. The bridge is no longer there, but the sight inspires awe regardless.
-- Farhad Manjoo
"Life: America the Beautiful: A Photographic Journey, Coast to Coast -- and Beyond" by the editors of Life (Life Books)
At first glance, "Life: America the Beautiful" looks like the most pedestrian of coffee-table books -- pretty pictures of places across the United States, accompanied by blurbs of text and a removable bonus black-and-white photo of mountains and sky by Ansel Adams, suitable for placement over easy chair or dorm bed. But look more closely and you'll see an amusing quirkiness to the editors' selection of our country's 100 most spectacular sites. Why the Cloisters (a cliff-top medieval-art outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and not anything else in New York City, when cities like San Francisco and Santa Fe, N.M., are included in their entirety? What are Tennessee's Ryman Auditorium (former home of the Grand Ole Opry), Iowa's Amana Colonies (site of "one of the longest-lasting communal experiments in history") and New Jersey's Pine Barrens (perhaps best known as the creepy bog where the Russian mobster eluded Paulie and Christopher on "The Sopranos") doing alongside the California redwoods, the Florida Everglades, the Tetons, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon and the like? Saving us all from boredom, that's what.
The occasional odd choice -- and the lack of clear criteria for inclusion in this handsome tome, apparently a deliberate hodgepodge on the part of the editors, who say they were going for a "variety" of sites, each "the best of its breed" -- imbue this book with a whiff of the unexpected, a pinch of the peculiar. Such curiosities also serve as something of an antidote to the shamefully unimaginative, disappointingly predictable pick for the No. 1 site: Washington, D.C., "the heart and soul of America." Honestly, couldn't the original thinkers who honored Oregon wine country over California's Napa or Sonoma have come up with something a little more unexpected? Well, no matter. Just turn the page and lose yourself in crisp color photography of magnificent mountains, lovely lighthouses, adorable wildlife and buildings captured at sunset (by Joel Meyerowitz and Michael Medford, among others) -- and pretend you're on the ultimate road trip. Are we there yet?
-- Amy Reiter
"The Vice Photo Book" (Vice Books)
Vice magazine exploded on the cultural scene in the late '90s like a loud fart at an overcrowded Belle and Sebastian concert. The bloody, porny, excessively politically incorrect, free magazine felt downright fresh after the frequently inert '90s indie scene, even if it was contrived most of the time. Vice thrived on alternately romanticizing and ridiculing an imagined Pabst-swilling, drug- and sex-addled middle (and much lower) class culture that its middle (and upper, way upper) class readers had no actual idea about. It functioned a little like nostalgia porn for its hipster readers, who felt a little ripped off by the gentrified Giuliani era. It also managed to attract some of the best emerging photographers -- Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson, Richard Kern, Jerry Hsu -- whose work is displayed to riveting effect in "The Vice Photo Book." This 13-year retrospective charts the magazine's growth from little Montreal upstart to foulmouthed New York mainstay, and we watch Vice progress from the self-consciously naughty (and still undeniably gripping) photos of friends bloodied from fights, artfully doing drugs or having sex to serious photojournalism (an outlawed women's school in Taliban-era Afghanistan stands out), adjusting its "anticensorship policy" along the way. "We had to institute a 'no pussy, no penis' policy because our advertisers were leaving us in droves," writes one of Vice's founders, Suroosh Alvi, in a foreword. In that way, this pure rush of juvenile adrenaline provides its own nostalgia porn for a Vice that's grown up -- and out of its addictively naughty childhood.
-- Kerry Lauerman
"The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978" by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner (National Gallery of Art/Princeton University Press)
This elegant book features casual snapshots taken by a range of unknown photographers over 90 years, published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name. Like treasures unearthed at a flea market, they offer a peek at strangers' intimate lives: playful glimpses of private silliness and awkward poses. Some photos catch their subjects unaware or trying to duck out of the frame. Many of the landscapes, still lives and amateur experiments with shutter speed and perspective easily stand on their own as art without curatorial fluffing -- but an illuminating essay accompanies each time period. Standing out in the collection are 30 or so snapshots from the mid-'50s credited to "Flo" (real name unknown). They're intrusive portraits of the young photographer's co-workers, and the fellow residents of her rooming house. Her subjects all seem to despise the camera: They turn away, scowl or cover their faces. But Flo keeps after them, doggedly trying to figure out -- like many of the unknown photographers in this book -- what the camera can tell her about her world.
-- Eryn Loeb
"A Lifetime of Secrets" by Frank Warren (William Morrow)
"I destroy videos of myself as a child because it pains me to see a time before I ruined my innocence," reads one of the staggering secrets in "A Lifetime of Secrets," the fourth book to spin out of Frank Warren's PostSecret Web site. The site, which Warren calls a "community art project," publishes missives from strangers wishing to unburden themselves about their lives. The art comes in how people tell their stories -- scrawled out on postcards in so many clever, deeply personal and moving ways you're bound to feel, after reading these things, something like a deity on the receiving end of the world's prayers. The book compiles some of the site's saddest secrets -- one, scribbled on a sealed envelope, reads, "This is the letter that I'll never have the guts to send you. And the one that I'll regret for the rest of my life" -- but also some of the funniest: "I am an editor for a large online atheist newsletter ... and I believe in GOD!"
-- Farhad Manjoo
Next page: New Yorker cartoons, underground rock stars, Antarctic splendor
