Retro Hell: Life in the 70s and 80s from Afros to Zotz by Darby Romeo
Valley Girls, Quaaludes, Howard Cosell, K-Tel Records. In today's pop-culture spin-cycle the 1970s and 1980s rule. Retro Hell provides a travelogue through the best and worst of these unforgettable decades. Orchestrated by the editor of the Ben Is Dead magazine, the book both sends up and celebrates the cultural landscape of our misspent youth. Thirty Ben Is Dead writers and hundreds of their readers helped assemble the nearly 1000 sharply opinionated alphabetical entries and sidebars. The icons, the eccentricities, the excesses, the kitsch - from alligator shirts, breakdancing, Earth Shoes and Farrah Fawcett to bumper stickers, eight-tracks, Schoolhouse Rock and John Travolta. Illustrated throughout with 100 black-and-white photographs and illustrations, the book offers a compendium of recent pop-culture arcana - a look back for everyone who survived the 70s and 80s.