1959: The Year Everything Changed

The year was surely a catalyst for change beyond what most realize. This book discusses the often forgotten (or not known) changes that occurred from politics to music & everything in between. '1959' is written in such a way that one can easily skip around as it covers a broad range of changes & inventions Being born after 1959, It put a lot of things in perspective for me. I passed the book on to my father who was born prior to & he recounted how, at the time, they knew not the changes that we come from what occurred back then. Whether you lived '59 or not, this is a good read & an interesting book.

Which came first, the Sputnik or the beatnik? What's the connection between Motown Records and the microchip? Were Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra really going to play Fidel and Raul Castro in a movie together? (The horror. The horror.) Why do Mort Sahl's jokes from the late fifties sound like they could have been written yesterday? What did Norman Mailer mean by calling himself a "White Negro" and was he being as pretentious as it sounds? In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Fred Kaplan answers these questions and examines many more artistic, scientific, and social issues that he thinks came to a head in that year, a turning point for the generation that came back from World World II and their young children. According to Norman Mailer the "psychic horror" caused by "the concentration camps and the atom bomb" gave birth to the White Negro, the hipster, "the American existentialist." Faced with universal death the only answer was "to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots . . ." It wasn't just artists who saw themselves as hipsters in revolt. Tom Hayden, founder of Students for a Democratic Society, described sociologist C. Wright Mills as combining "the rebel life of James Dean and the moral position of Albert Camus." Politicians became cool for the first time, too. Mailer saw John F. Kennedy as "The Hipster as Presidential Candidate." Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl," Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, physicist Herman Kahn's book on nuclear warfare strategy Thinking about the Unthinkable, Miles Davis's jazz album Kind of Blue, John Howard Griffin's cross-racial odyssey Black Like Me, and Lenny Bruce's "sick" comedy were all expressions of the "distinctive swoon" of this age. For Kaplan much of the sense of dislocation came from "the twin prospects of infinite expansion and total destruction." Hope and fear were engendered by every possibility, especially in science. Satellites and rockets could increase knowledge of the universe, but they were also weapons aimed at the planet from which they were launched. The International Geophysical Year (July 1957-December 1958) was a peaceful international scientific project, and President Eisenhower used it launch the Explorer satellite. The Explorer failed, but the Soviets responded with Sputnik, then Lunik, which inspired the American space program. (Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age by Matthew Brzezinski is an interesting scientific and social history on the Space Race.) What John F. Kennedy called "unknown opportunities and peril" meant that nothing was impossible. Fifty years later we feel different perils, but I'm not sure we believe in new opportunities any more.

It's pretentious to have a subtitle to this book that says "The Year Everything Changed". It's silly, too. Every instant of every second changes the universe in ways both subtle and major. But it's hard to deny that 1959 was a year where there were a lot of major changes; where a lot of things that had been brewing for years, decades and even centuries finally came to a head, laid the ground for the 1960's and helped to shape this country into something new and exciting. Kaplan does an excellent job of bringing home to the reader exactly what those changes were, what led to them and why they mattered. I knew next to nothing about the importance of jazz (largely because I don't care for it), but after reading this book's sections on jazz, I understand what it's important. The same goes for the background in our involvement in Vietnam, the development of our nuclear policy and the importance of the various great writers of the so-called "beat" generation. The book is well-written and entertaining, and I found that I had a tough time putting it down so that I could sleep; something rare for me with non-fiction. It covers such a wealth of diverse topics that if, like me, you don't care for the jazz section, there's another section before it you might like and more to come after that you might be more interested in. "1959: The Year Everything Changed" is a good, intelligent book and well worth your time and trouble to pick up.

This is a fun read. From the Soviet's succeeding first in the space race, to the founding of Motown out of Detroit, Lenny Bruce and his testing of censorship laws, the Boeing 707, The FDA with less than a dozen people getting the birth control approved. And within the Beatnik community of the interest in Buddhism. If you think Starbucks started the coffee craze, think again. It was in '59 that coffee shops and folk singers became popular. Then we had John F Kennedy deciding to run for President.

Fred Kaplan's previous books include a seminal Cold War text and a brilliant non-partisan analysis of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Now, Kaplan combines his great skill for research and analysis with an amazingly broad and eclectic vision of our cultural evolution. This book fits more useful and unique insights into its 300 pages than many authors create in their entire lives. Kaplan keeps it clear, concise and fascinating all the way through. Buying this book is money well spent: I just finished it, and I already want to sit back and read it again.