THE SEVENTIES: From Hot Pants to Hot...

THE SEVENTIES: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs by Andrew J. Edelstein & Kevin McDonough (Dutton: $13.95, illustrated). Edelstein and McDonough offer not so much a history as a laundry list of the fads and crazes of the Veneer Decade: mood rings, glitter rock, Smile Face buttons, The Village People, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Jaws.” The reader’s initial reaction is incredulity: Can 21 years have passed since “Love Story” and 16 since “Born to Run”? Was “Roots” really 14 years ago? But the authors fail to delve beneath the surface of these trends and put them into some sort of context. The result is an account as shallow as the era it depicts, in which mood rings are given as much space as the gay-liberation movement and Spiro Agnew receives less attention than John Travolta. The ‘70s? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “There was no then then.”