Strange days indeed : the 1970s : the golden age of paranoia / Francis Wheen.

Reprint. Originally published: London : Fourth Estate, 2009.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The paranoia blues -- Sleepless nights -- Stick it to the end, sir -- Going underground -- Madmen in theory and practice -- Going on a bear hunt -- Days of the jackals -- Such harmonious madness -- Eternal vigilance -- Crossing the psychic frontier -- The road to ruritania -- Lords of the beasts and fishes -- Morbid symptoms -- In the jungle labyrinth -- Let's do the time warp again.

A look back at the 1970s describes the paranoia of the era, examining the anxieties and odd behavior of world leaders and the spread of urban guerrillas and terrorist groups. The 1970s is the most deranged of decades in this rollicking, lurid retrospective. Taking Richard Nixons paranoid persecution complex as the periods zeitgeist, Wheen finds it everywhere. Along with an amusing rehash of Watergate, his panorama of 70s nuttiness encompasses conspiracy theories, Hollywood thrillers, the Baader-Meinhof gang, sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dicks letters to the FBI denouncing his literary agent as a Communist, and tawdry political intrigues in a Britain beset by strikes, power outages, IRA bombings, Trotskyist dramaturgy, and coup whisperings.

"This book tells the story of the decade that a young Francis Wheen walked into having pronounced he was dropping out to join the alternative society. Instead of the optimistic dreams of the Sixties he found a world on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown, huddled over candles waiting for the next terrorist bomb, kidnapping or food shortage warning." "Whether it was Nixon's demented behaviour in the White House, Harold Wilson's insistence that 'they' (whoever 'they' were) were out to get him, or the trial of Rupert Bear, it is a story almost too fantastical to be true. With his acute sense of the absurd, the author slices through the pungent melange of mistrust and conspiratorial fever to expose the sickly form of a decade in which nations were brought to a sclerotic halt by power cults, military coups, economic anarchy and the arrival of Uri Geller."--Book jacket of the 2009 London 1st edition.