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George's Reviews > 1959: The Year Everything Changed
1959: The Year Everything Changed
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NOT MY GLASS OF MUSCATEL.
“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 breaking against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.”—front-cover flap.
Despite the exciting promise of the first sentence of the front-cover flap (quoted above), and despite a smattering of interesting asides (e.g. “[Louis ‘Satchmo’] Armstrong canceled a 1957 [goodwill] trip to Moscow after Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a court order to integrate the schools.”—page 126; and all of chapter 24—‘Andromeda Freed from Her Chains’—pages 221/232), in his book �1959: The Year Everything Changed,� Fred Kaplan wastes way too much ink and far to much of the good reader’s time ruminating over Beat poets, Beat novelists, new-jazz ‘improvisarios,� (“…some of them making their horns sound deliberately ugly as a rebellion against white, bourgeois notions of beauty.”—page 210),
abstract-impressionist painters, avant-garde composers, and other whack-jobs, for my liking.
Recommendation: Read David Halberstam’s ‘The Fifties� instead.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. hardback edition, 322 pages
“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 breaking against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.”—front-cover flap.
Despite the exciting promise of the first sentence of the front-cover flap (quoted above), and despite a smattering of interesting asides (e.g. “[Louis ‘Satchmo’] Armstrong canceled a 1957 [goodwill] trip to Moscow after Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a court order to integrate the schools.”—page 126; and all of chapter 24—‘Andromeda Freed from Her Chains’—pages 221/232), in his book �1959: The Year Everything Changed,� Fred Kaplan wastes way too much ink and far to much of the good reader’s time ruminating over Beat poets, Beat novelists, new-jazz ‘improvisarios,� (“…some of them making their horns sound deliberately ugly as a rebellion against white, bourgeois notions of beauty.”—page 210),
abstract-impressionist painters, avant-garde composers, and other whack-jobs, for my liking.
Recommendation: Read David Halberstam’s ‘The Fifties� instead.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. hardback edition, 322 pages
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Reading Progress
January 10, 2011
– Shelved
March 9, 2011
–
Started Reading
March 14, 2011
–
Finished Reading
