Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good book, better balance and it could have been great., September 19, 2009
This review is from: 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Hardcover)
1959 was a pivotal year. And Fred Kaplan surely makes a case on the cultural revolution that really precipitated the changes of the 60s and beyond. All students of 20th Century American Studies should read this volume. That said, Kaplan, who is a jazz blogger, does a terrific job of showing its influence on rock and roll, racial relations and morphing from the accepted forms of art to the less accepted and outside the box concepts of "art". What almost ruins this book is his seeming endless desire to demonstrate his knowledge of musical theory and rhythms that have nothing to do with his premise - both state and demonstrated.
It becomes absurd at points. With John Coltrane "piling chords on top of chords within chords, pushing the harmonic complexity beyond their limit (sic)". The next paragraph leaves an astute reader apoplectic. "As the Black Power movement took off in the sixties, several black musicians took the examples of Coleman, Coltrane . . . as a license to play free as a POLITICAL statement - breaking down chords and rhythms as as symbol for breaking down white authority and power. . . ". While both happened, antecedent an precedent and a casual relationship are highly questionable. It is academic reaching by a terrific writer but one who I would question the credentials, no less research, to make such bold claims. Perhaps they are true. But it surely isn't demonstrated in this writing.
If you are not interested in Jazz or Beat writers, this is not your book, unless you feel the need to better understand the cultural changes of the beginning of the later part of the 20th Century. Perhaps a different name for this book would help. And more on other events, cultural included, than his near obsession with the Beats and the Jazz musicians. Overall, fairly disjointed and off-premise writing.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It was a very good year, July 29, 2009
This review is from: 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"America is having a nervous breakdown." - Allen Ginsberg, 1959, August 2, 2009
This review is from: 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
