Oh this was bad.

I was given this as a gift years ago and I would have stopped less than halfway through if it weren't. Decided to knock it off the list as a light non-fiction to finish out the summer, and while it was easy enough to get through it is a god-awful mess.

Biskind takes on all and sundry in a cocaine rush of allusions to pop-culture, whiplashing from modern superhero films to 50s B-movies, Westerns (old and some younger) to science fiction. The thesis on the cover of the book is that icons of pulp culture have 'made America great for extremism'. The book makes no clear statement of the same - there is no argument that representations in popular culture shapes or forms what is likely or easy for people to imagine as possible. Nor is there a clear argument that things work the other way, that popular political sentiments come to be expressed in pop culture. In theory that would leave space for real nuance - the relationship between pop culture material and politics is complex and bidirectional, a feedback loop of the imaginary.

Nope.

The book, from the first pages, is just a slew of 'here's a political reading of particular events in particular pop culture examples', where 'political reading' involves it being binned into one of three options - extreme left, extreme right, and centre. There are a few examples of quirky, insightful commentary on the material, but the anecdotes are so numerous, each given at most a couple of paragraphs of exposition before moving on, that it just becomes an avalanche of bits with very little whole to put them together.

It's like a 200+ page version of "Tell it to me in Star Wars" (youtu.be/H7V_Nz5IGHU?t=103), except what's being explained is already Curious George Goes to Congress.

Ultimately, I think Biskind is trying to get across that life and politics are bigger and more complex than can be captured in the broad brush strokes of a pop-culture movie, television show, or YA novel. The shallowness of his engagement with his raw materials, though, does both his material and his topic an injustice.

Not recommended.