DANCING IN THE DARK A Cultural History of the Great Depression

The title refers to a Depression-era song that captured the zeitgeist of the New Deal society and culture. Focusing on the milieu of the 1930s, an art critic dwells on the enormous effect poverty and hopelessness made on American arts: films, novels, theater, and music. Dickstein provides examples from hundreds of sources, making peripatetic leaps through time as he pontificates. Narrator Malcolm Hillgartner inflects the narrative by nearly yelling at times and then dropping to a level that is barely audible. He does a Yiddish accent and reads complete lines of the language. After warming to Hillgartner’s turgid style, listeners may come to agree that he aptly reproduces the aesthetic changes Dickstein discusses in his gloomy Steinbeck-like portrayals of life and penury. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2010]