Hardboiled & High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (review)
fiction and of Baldwin's strategy of bringing together what DeKoven describes elsewhere as "what we now think of as postmodern identity politics . . . with the universalist, liberatory goals of modernity" (229). Essential to DeKoven's larger discussion is her consideration of the figuring of the collective in the pivotal culture of the sixties. Her reading of the Living Theater's Paradise Now (1968) is an extremely useful contribution in this context. And in her attentive reading of Students for a Democratic Society's Port Huron Statement (1962), she carefully traces out both its complex investments in individual action, authenticity, and avant-gardism, and its affirmations of participatory democracy, local or single-issue strategies, and a more worldly intellectual culture. DeKoven's book also contains an important consideration of Francis FitzGerald's 1972 book, Fire in the Lake, which she fairly describes as "one of the most eloquent and moving denunciations of the [Vietnam] war I have ever seen" (212). As DeKoven demonstrates in her reading, Fitzgerald's text resonates with the dominantly modern and emergently postmodern discourses of the culture of the sixties but also anticipates, particularly in her description of Vietnamese culture, much that will come to be seen as central to "global, postcolonial postmodernity" (227). Utopia Limited is a stimulating, scholarly, and richly informed reading of the place of sixties culture in the vast sea-change from modernity to postmodernity. For scholars of contemporary literature, American studies, popular culture, and cultural history, this is a necessary and rewarding work.