Re-examining the era of James Dean, ‘Ozzie & Harriet,’ & ‘I Love Lucy’
The Forgotten Fifties
By James Conaway
Hardcover, 224 pages, $45 (Skira Rizzoli)
From the pages and archives of LOOK magazine, a publication that defined the Fifties in images and words, comes this handsome photographic celebration of the complicated, often contradictory era that transformed America’s identity through an unprecedented confluence of socio-economics, culture and politics at the end of World War II. With 200 color and black and white photos, it’s a chronological museum of memories charting the ups and downs of a nation as it finds its way through the often mixed signals of Ozzie and Harriet and I Love Lucy, John F. Kennedy, James Dean, Disneyland, suburban prosperity, urban slums and other touchstones from an era that wasn’t quite as simple as it might seem.
—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine
The Media Tourist 