Every Wrong Direction An

Émigré’s Memoir

DAN

BURT

Praise for Dan Burt’s You Think It Strange:

“Burt’s early life was indeed a triumph of wit and will. He managed to escape a world filled with violence and a culture that valued street smarts over book smarts, all the while knowing that just about everyone around him thought little of his prospects. That he made it out at all is extraordinary. That he became a successful lawyer and writer is virtually unimaginable.”

COMMONWEAL

“Dan Burt is a fine poet, and this memoir has all the sensitivity and vigilance you might expect from a writer with such a background. But his prose also has a robustness and documentary power that continually startles and engages. As it combines these things, You Think It Strange catches the strangeness of the world and makes it familiar.”

—

SIR ANDREW MOTION, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, 1999-2009

Every Wrong Direction recreates and dissects the bitter education of Dan Burt, an American émigré who never found a home in America. It begins in the row homes of Jewish immigrants and working-class Italians on the mean streets of 1950s South Philadelphia. Every Wrong Direction follows the author from the rough, working-class childhood that groomed him to be a butcher or charter boat captain, through America, Britain, and Saudi Arabia as student, lawyer, spy, culture warrior, and expatriate, ending with his appointment as an Honorary Fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Between this beginning and end, through a Philadelphia commuter college, to Cambridge University, then Yale Law School, across the working to upper classes, three countries, and seven cities over 43 years, it maps his pursuit of, realization, disillusionment with and abandonment of America and the American Dream.

DAN BURT is a prolific author whose work has appeared in The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, and The New Statesman, among numerous other publications, newspapers, periodicals, and anthologies. He is also the author of four books of poetry and prose and a brief childhood memoir, You Think It Strange

September 2022

Territory: All Americas

Memoir • History

AMERICA’S PIVOTAL YEAR 1980

America’s Pivotal Year

JIM CULLEN

“Informed and perceptive”

—Norman Lear on Those Were the Days

“Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today.” —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

“This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative....Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch.”

—Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History

JIM CULLEN

US History-20th Century • Popular Culture

Table of Contents

Introduction: Facing Janus

Chapter 1 On the Cusp: American Politics and Culture in 1979

Chapter 2 Wind Shear: The Political Cultures of 1980

Chapter 3 The Closing of Heaven’s Gate: Hollywood in Transition

Chapter 4 Starting Over: Pop Music’s Future Goes Back to the Past

Chapter 5 Ebb and Flow: Tidal Shifts in Broadcast Television

Chapter 6 Turning the Page: The Publishing Industry in 1980

Chapter 7 Inflection Point: Autumn, 1980

Conclusion: Inaugurating the Eighties

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the author Index

1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.

1980: America’s Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.

JIM CULLEN is the author of numerous books, including The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Those Were the Days: Why ‘All in the Family’ Still Matters, and From Memory to History: Television Versions of the Twentieth Century. He teaches history at the newly-founded upper division of Greenwich Country Day School.