A Chronicle of Wasted Time is a cultural history of the 1970s in America. It presupposes that the Seventies had a distinct character, although it cannot be so sharply defined as the Sixties or Eighties. A book on the Seventies joins almost innumerable unresolved elements, and what troubled that decade continues to trouble us. The difficult part is that these troubling elements do not connect, so that a continuous narrative is often impossible to maintain. Yet there was something like a "culture" of the Seventies, however disconnected the parts. That culture is the theme of the book.