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I think it would be hard to do what Mr. Kaplan has done here—to take a single year in history that was so full of significance, to break it down into its main currents, and then to show the links between those currents—but he has effectively pulled it off. Did you know, for example, that an NCO from Great Bend, Kansas, was sitting in India during the Second World War trying to make radios lighter for commandos air-dropping into Burma and used this work to invent the microprocessor? Not too far away, Norman Mailer was jotting down notes that would later produce “The Naked and the Dead�� and his long-term struggles to top that work while bouncing around Greenwich Village are also woven into the narrative here. For a non-musician, the chapters on Jazz are a little slow, but hanging out with Miles Davis, Brubeck, and Dizzy Gillespie make it worth the read. Kaplan’s past work on the NY Times Arts & Leisure Section is easy to see here, but so is his time at the Boston Globe, working the Pentagon and Post-Soviet Moscow beats. He effectively asks the ‘What-If�� questions pertinent to a world constantly thinking about Sputnik and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation as he explores the U-2 incident that sabotaged the relationship between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, the ominous developments in Southeast Asia after the French left, and Castro’s visit to the U.S. after toppling Batista. His chapter on Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Museum of Modern Art did little to dispel my opinion that modern artists are all a bit squirrelly, and I still don’t have much use for Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs—but I better understand their significance after reading this book. The chapter on Barry Gordy and Motown (heartbreaking, for anyone paying attention to what Detroit has become over the last 20 years) is superlative, as are the narratives on the end of the Comstock Act and the invention of the Birth Control Pill. Mr. Kaplan has effectively connected and described the main currents of the year that flowed into the ��60s—teeing up JFK, Viet Nam, and the protest movements—and the collapse of idealism that later hit us at Altamont, the ��68 Democratic Convention, and the Tet Offensive. There’s something new in this book for anyone interested in current affairs or American culture; recommend.