This was social history - entertaining, fascinating and informing - in the making. Days of Wine and Rage explores the tempo and shifts in mores and style of a dynamic decade - the 70s - in Australia's cultural development. Deftly interweaving literature and documentary history, Frank Moorhouse traces, from their avant-garde origins, significant threads in Australia's social fabric - the sub-cultural movements towards sexual liberation, cultural identity and a new creative and intellectual confidence. The multi-faceted examination evokes a lively impression of the ambience in which these social changes were generated and of the characters who got them going. Frank Moorhouse was hailed as 'the widest-read chronicler of the new intelligentsia and their uncertainties'. Nowhere are his skills in literary and editorial craftsmanship and his acuity as observer of social nuance more evident than in this book.