The 1960s, I tell my students, began in 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The decade ended in April 1975, when Gerald R. Ford, the accidental president, acknowledged that the Vietnam War “was finished as far as the United States is concerned.” Short, shattered and unsettled, the 1970s gave up the ghost when the Gipper galloped into Georgetown.

Thomas Hine, a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1973 to 1996, doesn’t see it that way. In The Great Funk, he claims that while the ‘60s was about struggle, the ‘70s involved acceptance. In disappointment, depression and disaster, Americans found and forged “something deeply liberating.” They felt free to experiment—on something funky. “When the forces of order are revealed to be a malign conspiracy,” Hine suggests, “it’s a good time for a party.” In the 1970s, America fragmented without falling apart.

The Great Funk is a selective, idiosyncratic history, more evocative than analytical. Hine has virtually nothing to say about Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, affirmative action, school busing, or the Moral Majority. His explanation of the end of the ‘70s (“an act of collective will, or perhaps an exercise in mass denial”) is as thin as his account of its onset (“confrontation gave way to improvisation and cooperation”). Nonetheless, with deliciously detailed descriptions and almost 300 illustrations, The Great Funk captures the shapes, smells and sensibilities of the chaotic and conflicted “Me Decade.”

Not surprisingly, the man House & Garden has called “America’s sharpest design critic” is at his best describing the changes in home furnishings and decorations in the ‘70s. Americans, Hine demonstrates, transformed their heretofore clean, cold and uncluttered homes into “indoor rain forests.” Searching for a haven in a heartless world, they put plants in pots or on hangers in windows. Unwilling or unable to commit to another human being, they read “The Secret Life of Plants” and fantasized about friendships with a fern, a ficus or a pet rock.

Despite stagflation, austerity was rarely in evidence in apartments and homes. Americans accumulated lots of stuff. They selected each item, from “finds” in flea markets to domiciles designed by decorators, because it expressed the personality of the purchaser. “Muddy hues, lumpy textures and overgrown vegetation” dominated domestic spaces. Shag carpets became popular even before the energy crisis of 1973. Shag blurred boundaries, making floors places to “sit, sprawl or snuggle”—open, informal and sensual. Like a full beard or an unmowed lawn, the “shag carpet was a celebration of growth—the force of life that encourages optimism even when man-made systems break down.”

Along with home furnishings, the “embarrassments of the era”—polyester leisure suits, streakers, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull—reveal “new kinds of consciousness struggling to be born.” The flock remained willing to conform. But the rewards—economic prosperity and security—could no longer be taken for granted. Pessimism about progress, Hine emphasizes, opened the door to subjectivity, and, for better and worse, identity politics. At discos, “sex wasn’t the sub-text; it was blatantly the subject.” And by “putting gym-hardened bodies on display,” as they danced to songs of abandon and receptivity, gays could celebrate, and flaunt, their newly uncloseted lives.

Acknowledging that nostalgia is especially inappropriate for the 1970s, which was anything but an age of innocence, Hine nonetheless concludes that the decade’s disrespect was healthy, its experimentation a sign of resiliency, and the failures of its leaders an opening “for the freedom of the many.” Even if baby boomers find his summary selective and sanguine, they’ll enjoy The Great Funk‘s trip down memory lane. After all, as Hine reminds us, “the seventies table could be set with intriguingly mismatched plates.”