1959: The Year Everything Changed

This is the title of a book by Fred Kaplan that I've been reading. I thought the year might catch your attention, as it did mine when I chanced upon a copy in a KL bookstore.

Yes, yes .. I know what you are thinking - the most significant thing that happened in 1959 was that all of us were born. And of course I fully agree :-)

But in addition to that momentous event, 1959 was apparently also significant in a number of other ways, as is chronicled in the book.
Kaplan, a Slate columnist, takes a contrarian view to the common wisdom that the 1960s were the source of the cultural shift from pre-World War II traditions to the individualistic, question-authority world of today.

In Kaplan's view, the watershed year in this transformation is 1959. He delves into that year's cultural and political scene, citing Miles Davis and his revolutionary album Kind of Blue; William Burroughs and his equally revolutionary novel, Naked Lunch; and the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's radically designed Guggenheim Museum in New York City as examples of fundamental breaks with past conventions.

Kaplan highlights three 1959 events that he convincingly argues were catalysts for paradigm changes:

• in relationships between men and women (the drug company Searle sought FDA approval for the birth control pill),
• in how citizens view their government (the first American soldiers were killed in Vietnam), and
• in communications and information transfer (the microchip was introduced to the world).

The blurb on the inside front cover also gives you a pretty good idea what's in the book:

"It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap—all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.

It was a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed into a “new frontier” that offered the twin prospects of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation—a frontier that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an eerily similar turning point."

Good read. Interesting insights.


Details on the book
"1959: The Year Everything Changed"
by Fred Kaplan
Wiley (2009)