Of late, it has become peculiarly easy to divine an American's political persuasion based on whether they idolize the 1950s or 1960s. The spread of information in the photo captions is impressive, too, and Ken has done a fine job of recapturing the real essence of what to many enthusiasts really were “the good old days. Since the early 2000s, there has been a concerted attempt by supporters of deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos to wipe the shit off his name and polish it to brand-new. Visually and in content style, the book reminds me of an extra-thick edition of an old-fashioned `penny dreadful' newspaper.

Most medical schools were run by people more interested in tuition fees than standards, thereby graduating many who knew nothing about medicine. That ended when in 1991 Yugoslavia broke apart and resulted in a decade-long war with plenty of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and war crimes, whose impact can be felt in the successor states to this day. I'm taking off a star for Bettmann's often overheated tone and tendency to make oversimplified blanket pronouncements about the various subjects under discussion, but for the most part the wealth of photographs and illustrations he uses to make his points almost make up for it.For those fairly new to the era and subject areas discussed by O''Neil and of a liberal persuasion then I would without hesitation recommend the book. He wrote, "for the mass of people, the park might have been 100 miles away, too distant even for an annual outing.

The author sets out to parallel shock headlines of recent years with those same headlines in the good old days. When we press time’s rewind button, those vintage recollections of yesteryear have somehow lost their lustre. My 3 stars would, for a different reader starting out exploring Victorian poverty, crime and social policy and attitudes would probably and rightly give it 5!

Long sections of the text are direct quotes from other sources that seem like they'd be more effective if woven into the narrative instead of extracted and used verbatim. Night/Shift is aimed at all those who don't feel comfortable around today's world, with surveillance tech everywhere. EIZIN’s works, which have graced the covers of FM magazines and many music jackets, are once again in the spotlight as icons of the era.

The canonical anecdote is illustrative: "The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism. Chapters are divided by vice, and look at problems like drug and alcohol dependency, crimes involving children and child abuse, murder, prostitution, common street crime like petty theft, and perhaps most intriguingly the section on cons, fraud and psychic crime. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). As their work achieved a depraved efficiency, the camp guards enjoyed more time for social activities.Not that we realised back in the 1970s and 1980s but for many of us today, upon reflection they certainly were.