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Blackout
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Product Description
On July 13, 1977, there was a blackout in New York City. With the dark came excitement, adventure, and fright in subway tunnels, office towers, busy intersections, high-rise stairwells, hotel lobbies, elevators, and hospitals. There was revelry in bars and restaurants, music and dancing in the streets. On block after block, men and women proved themselves heroes by helping neighbors and strangers make it through the night.
Unfortunately, there was also widespread looting, vandalism, and arson. Even before police restored order, people began to ask and argue about why. Why did people do what they did when the lights went out? The argument raged for weeks but it was just like the night: lots of heat, little light-a shouting match between those who held fast to one explanation and those who held fast to another.
James Goodman cuts between accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments to re-create that night and its aftermath in a dizzying accumulation of detail. Rejecting simple dichotomies and one-dimensional explanations for why people act as they do in moments of conflict and crisis, Goodman illuminates attitudes, ideas, and experiences that have been lost in facile generalizations and analyses. Journalistic re-creation at its most exciting, Blackout provides a whirlwind tour of 1970s New York and a challenge to conventional thinking.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1861975 in Books
- Published on: 2005-06-23
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Fear and looting in New York. That's how many remember the 1977 blackout. While Son of Sam was still at large and unemployment was high, nine million people were suddenly plunged into darkness on a hot July evening. Unlike the comparative calm that characterized the 1965 and 2003 blackouts, in 1977 mobs went on a violent rampage. Adults, teens and children torched buildings, yanked protective metal grills off storefronts and smashed windows to fill their shopping carts with food, appliances, jewelry and clothing. These groups outnumbered police (only 14 officers were on duty in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that evening) and robbed more than 2,000 stores city-wide. By the time power was restored after 25 hours, damages from the devastation had climbed toward $61 million. Rutgers history professor Goodman, a Pulitzer finalist for his first book (Stories of Scottsboro), carries the reader beyond conventional journalism for a multidimensional, kaleidoscopic narrative history, covering the events and aftermath from all angles: "I tell my story in bursts, recreating incidents, deeds, accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments, trying to evoke mood and place and time." He recalls the 1977 blackout through personal accounts, studies, public reports and period articles from magazines (Time, Newsweek) and newspapers (the New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Village Voice, Amsterdam News). While the more mundane tales of revelry and inconvenience will appear familiar to many readers after blackouts this past year in the U.S., Canada, England and Italy, Goodman reminds us that the excessive looting of 1977 is the looming dark side of power outages in the electrified world.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Rushed out by its publisher after the Northeast's most recent major power outage, the latest from Pulitzer finalist Goodman (Stories of Scottsboro, 1994) captures New York City during the blackout of 1977. It's a portrait of a city hurting from unemployment, spooked by the Son of Sam murders, and dizzy with inflation. Goodman uses a staccato style that is reminiscent of John Dos Passos' socioliterary snapshots, catching citizens in the midst of daily routines, at work and play, barhopping and making love. The narrative's relentless drumbeat becomes somewhat annoying at times, but as the story turns to looting, vandalism, and arson, Goodman's true abilities take over, and the reader is caught up in a nonfiction mystery that cries out for a solution--why do people act as they do under these circumstances? Almost lost is the puerile behavior of the Con Edison executives, who seemed to have spent their time "flak-catching" rather than problem solving. Goodman sheds light on a dark episode in the life of the Big Apple. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Extraordinary . . . To do justice to the Scottsboro story a book would have to combine edge-of-the-seat reportage and epic narrative sweep. And it is just such a book that James Goodman has given us, a beautifully realized history . . . written with complete authority, tight emotional control, and brilliant use of archival material." -- Chicago Tribune
"Superb . . . Mr. Goodman breaks fresh ground . . . One cannot read [this] remarkable book without being moved." -- The New York Times Book Review
