This is a well-written and well-researched examination of American society and culture during the "bunkered decades" of the 1960s and 1980s.
David L. Pike has taught in the Department of Literature at American University since 1995. He is the author of Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds; Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800-1945; Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001; Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, neo-Victorianism, subterranea, urban fantasy, global urban culture, and Paris and London. He is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City and of Literature: A World of Writing, and co-general editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature.