“Belgrad’s book is a big, hulking idea, laid out in fractal detail. . . .He gives us Talmudic exegeses of everything from the famous “crying Indian” public service announcement to John Cage’s works to a lesser-known EPA pamphlet cautioning against the dangers of noise pollution. . . .  Belgrad makes a convincing argument for looking carefully at this past, parsing it gently. In a moment without much optimism, it might be worth recovering these old seeds of hope.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

“There's something particularly enjoyable about a volume of intellectual history that deals with serious ideas but also makes some room for their less respectable offspring.”

Inside Higher Ed

“Recommended. . . Belgrad has made a significant contribution to understanding the 1970s.”

Choice

“The Culture of Feedback is informative, insightful and written with clarity and interest as it rightly refocuses attention on the value of the decade and its ecological consciousness.”

Journal of American Culture

"Belgrad’s Culture of Feedback is an excellent example of recent provocative work engaging the long arc of the 1970s. . . . Belgrad has crafted argument full of depth and nuance that all serious students of ecological history, the counterculture, and the evolution of American thought will have to take seriously. All in all, this book a valuable addition to the growing literature on the 1970s."

Western Historical Quarterly

“This book is a glittering kaleidoscope, spinning through cybernetic theory, ecofeminism, the music of Brian Eno, and the songs of whales. As important as it is fun, The Culture of Feedback shows us how science and American culture shaped each other in the 1970s and, in the process, shaped our lives today.”

Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture

“Belgrad offers a valuable reassessment of the American 1970s in this wide-ranging, clearly written account of an ecological ‘culture of feedback’ whose diverse roots ranged from Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics to Gary Snyder’s explorations of Native American philosophy, and whose theories of self-organizing coevolutionary development animated such varied endeavors as John Lilly’s work with dolphins and Brian Eno’s ambient music. Belgrad’s superb intellectual history counters the widespread notion that the decade was marked by a narcissistic national decline.”

Jeffrey L. Meikle, author of Design in the USA

"[Belgrad] uses a wide range of published primary and secondary sources to frame the 1970s as defined by ecological thinking and feedback. . . . Belgrad’s book challenges what he sees  s a distorted and dour historiography that overemphasizes national lethargy and narcissism."

American Historical Review

"Data from the philosophical, the political and the aesthetic sit side by side in these pages, with nary a creak in the prose."

S-USIH