The end of the 1950s was a pivotal time, a cabinet of wonders, the author contends, that overshadows every other year, including those of the '60s.
When a writer needs a break these days, he picks a year -- 1968 was popular last year -- and spends a few hundred pages arguing how it's central to our lives now. This year, we have Rob Kirkpatrick's “1969: The Year Everything Changed" and now Fred Kaplan's “1959," whose subtitle makes the same claim. Can it be true of both years? The answer is yes, of course. That's the thing -- every year is the year. In just this past June, we saw violent protests in Iran, a coup in Honduras, the sentencing of Bernie Madoff, the death of Michael Jackson, and the implosion, via sex scandal, of two Republican presidential hopefuls. There's always a hailstorm of interest out there. And the challenge is in making these disparate, interesting things cohere and produce some sort of larger meaning. The challenge for a book like “1959" is not simply gathering together all the interesting data about Kaplan's favorite year -- and it is a fascinating one -- but in presenting it with a style that's meaningful and inventive.
Kaplan's premise is certainly a good one. He's arguing that the real fulcrum of the 20th century and beyond is not -- as many argue -- the 1960s, but the unsung '50s. Forget Woodstock, forget LSD, forget the peace marches and “I Have a Dream." Forget also Altamont, Vietnam, race riots and the assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. “The truly pivotal moments of history are those whose legacies endure," Kaplan writes. “And, as the mid-forties recede into abstract nostalgia, and the late sixties evoke puzzled shudders, it is the events of 1959 that continue to resonate in our own time."
This is an incredibly audacious claim, but it highlights a problem with this type of book -- casual history, we might call it -- which never seems to decide if it wants to be really serious or just kind of fun. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an expert on any number of subjects both political and cultural, Kaplan is capable of being as serious as anybody, and yet it's when his book is at its most serious that it feels least persuasive. What Kaplan really wants to do, I think, is illuminate some personal icons: Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman; Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; Norman Mailer, John Cassavetes, Berry Gordy. Indeed, all of these artists were engaged in radically important work in 1959, tantamount even to a kind of renaissance. But then, how do you connect painting or jazz to the invention of the microchip (March 24, 1959)? Or the Cuban revolution (Jan. 1)? And what about the civil rights movement (King was in India, Malcolm X in the Middle East)? Or women?
When a writer needs a break these days, he picks a year -- 1968 was popular last year -- and spends a few hundred pages arguing how it's central to our lives now. This year, we have Rob Kirkpatrick's “1969: The Year Everything Changed" and now Fred Kaplan's “1959," whose subtitle makes the same claim. Can it be true of both years? The answer is yes, of course. That's the thing -- every year is the year. In just this past June, we saw violent protests in Iran, a coup in Honduras, the sentencing of Bernie Madoff, the death of Michael Jackson, and the implosion, via sex scandal, of two Republican presidential hopefuls. There's always a hailstorm of interest out there. And the challenge is in making these disparate, interesting things cohere and produce some sort of larger meaning. The challenge for a book like “1959" is not simply gathering together all the interesting data about Kaplan's favorite year -- and it is a fascinating one -- but in presenting it with a style that's meaningful and inventive.
Kaplan's premise is certainly a good one. He's arguing that the real fulcrum of the 20th century and beyond is not -- as many argue -- the 1960s, but the unsung '50s. Forget Woodstock, forget LSD, forget the peace marches and “I Have a Dream." Forget also Altamont, Vietnam, race riots and the assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. “The truly pivotal moments of history are those whose legacies endure," Kaplan writes. “And, as the mid-forties recede into abstract nostalgia, and the late sixties evoke puzzled shudders, it is the events of 1959 that continue to resonate in our own time."
This is an incredibly audacious claim, but it highlights a problem with this type of book -- casual history, we might call it -- which never seems to decide if it wants to be really serious or just kind of fun. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an expert on any number of subjects both political and cultural, Kaplan is capable of being as serious as anybody, and yet it's when his book is at its most serious that it feels least persuasive. What Kaplan really wants to do, I think, is illuminate some personal icons: Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman; Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; Norman Mailer, John Cassavetes, Berry Gordy. Indeed, all of these artists were engaged in radically important work in 1959, tantamount even to a kind of renaissance. But then, how do you connect painting or jazz to the invention of the microchip (March 24, 1959)? Or the Cuban revolution (Jan. 1)? And what about the civil rights movement (King was in India, Malcolm X in the Middle East)? Or women?
