Mad Men addicts will get their next fix with the show’s fourth season premiere on 7/27, but those who can’t wait should check out the delightful Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America (available 7/20), a new book by Natasha Vargas-Cooper that surveys the show’s influences from 1960s culture.
An “attempt to recreate the cultural matrix of the moment,” Mad Men Unbuttoned is filled with mini-essays on the glamorous culture of the debonair decade—exploring subjects like advertising, sex, design and cigarettes—on glossy pages, among lavish illustrations. Here you’ll find anecdotes and analyses of a time passed. Did you know, for instance, that Don Draper is based on a real ad man named Draper Daniels? Or that a polite wedding night in the ’60s didn’t involve sex? If yes, there’s plenty more. This book doesn’t slavishly hash out the details of its namesake. It’s more like a little time machine that takes us, as Mr. Draper so elegantly put it, “to a place where we ache to go again.”
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