Customer Reviews

1959: The Year Everything Changed

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is Concept History. The traditional historian researches first, then pronounces conclusions. The concept historian pronounces first, then researches.

The concept here is that 1959 was the year when America pivoted from the shallow, stultified '50s to the dynamic, creative 60s.

The trouble with The Concept Method is that the concept deforms the facts. The concept here is simple-minded at best, silly at worst.

David Halberstam's marvelous "The Fifites" put to rest forever the notion that the 50s were a stagnant time. On the contrary, as Halberstam demonstrated in his captivating style, it was an especially dynamic, innovative era. I could find no reference to Halberstam in Kaplan's sources, an astonishing omission.

It's true that the era was characterized by a certain stylized posturing and peer-enforced conformity. "Decent" people were untroubled by Jim Crow, scandalized by rock and roll, and apoplectic over such then-rebels as Lenny Bruce. We laugh at them now.

But there was more diversity than Kaplan allows. Moreover, the Fifties were positively free-wheeling compared to the stylized posturing and peer-enforced conformity that characterized the 60s. We laugh even harder at them.

I give the book three stars, despite the flawed concept, because it is a diverting piece of nostalgia. Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley, Mort Sahl, Project Mercury, the Edsel, Chuck Berry, Harry Belafonte, Miles Davis; such deservedly forgotten figures as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and of course Eisenhower Nixon Kennedy Castro and Khrushchev--we get to revisit them all. You will probably not learn anything new, but re-visitations can have their own value.

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.

I think Fred Kaplan tried to set the bar too high for this book. By referring to 1959 as the year that changed everything I think he was off the mark by a great deal. For one thing, most of the events he speaks of passed through 1959 but had their major moments in either previous years or future years. Obviously 1959 was a minor year for the Civil Rights movement and the Sexual Revolution. He did a great job discussing the cold war, but seemed to spend as much time on the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 then he did of 1959.

No this is not a great book and barely registers as a good book! Read David Halberstam's book for a much better picture of the era.

I was hoping for a book that looked at issues, themes and incidents weaved within the fabric of the days of 1959. Instead I got a book that makes ridiculous and nebulous claims for a year as if it were the event itself. A year is just a marker in time, it has no inherent history and Kaplan acts as if "1959" does.

First, let me praise the writing; Fred Kaplan's prose style is engrossing and lucid. That said, the book's claim that "everything changed" is really about seeing in the year 1959, the year we currently live in. He believes that our technology, culture, politics and society can only understood because of themes that first blossomed during that fateful year. My problem with this approach is two-fold; the idea that the author living now knows what forms our own time is a dubious proposition and second it gives the ideas he presents a reductive quality - they only exist in order to substantiate his own belief in what is now important.

Since he isn't dealing with the actual events of 1959 per se except as how they serve as a hook for him to talk about the themes and issues that preoccupy him during 2009, the themes, issues and personalities are treated skimpily, more as evidence he marshals to explain to us how these are the things that matter to us today but how they mattered in 1959 and how they interacted with each other is not addressed. A lost opportunity.

The sixties marked the beginning of a huge transformation in America that changed our view of the world and ourselves. Fred Kaplan's book highlights some of the pivotal beginnings of those changes viewed from the year 1959. He focuses primarily on literature, music and art where each broke from traditions and conventions to something very new. Rules, barriers and boundaries gave way to free form, expansion and no limits. Young people began to reflect the world as they saw it or was rather than the way it ought to be. Kaplan doesn't always explain the connections between what was happening with the Beat generation writers, changes in Jazz music and the emergence of a new school of Art to the emerging crisis of race, gender, generation and war that emerges over the next decade. However one can begin to see those connections without him specifically making that effort. It was a world where this new freedom and new frontiers crashed with the possibilities of catastrophic destruction and annihilation. He doesn't spend as much time on this last note but does point out how the same people who were opening up these new roads were quite often self destructive through alcohol or drugs and met early ends.

I enjoyed this book though I admit a lot of that was because I was born in 1959 -- fifty years ago now -- and would love to believe that 1959 was a "pivotal" year but despite my longing Mr. Kapan does not really convince that just because Castro took over January 1, 1959 in Cuba; Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union, the Guggenheim was finished, Dr. Strangelove was being palnned and the movie icon, Errol Flynn died, that this was a "pivotal" year. I think the case that "every year" is a pivotal one could also be made. Still it is a good backdrop to Jack Keroauc's "On the Road" and Dharma Bums, both which I recommend much higher than this and of course for those of us turning 50 in 2009. I'm not really sure anyone else cares.

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.