欧宝娱乐

1959 -- a lot happened during this year and while the author could have just listed the things that happened and provided a brief explanation of each item, Fred Kaplan went in a different direction.

He talks about each occurrence and then provides a detailed history that surrounds these events. For some things, such as the birth control pill, 1959 was a sort of culmination of years of work by Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) and her contemporaries.

For other events, 1959 was the beginning. For example, John F. Kennedy decided to run for President of the United States at the end of 1959. This would mark the beginning of a "new" political dynasty that carried through Ted Kennedy's passing 40 years later.

Some things that left their mark while I was reading this:

At the start of his 7th year as president, Dwight Eisenhower was sixty-eight, up till then the oldest man ever to hold office. His notoriously belligerent secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (think about Dulles airport), was terminally ill with cancer and would die before the summer. After prolonged war prosperity, the American economy was in recession ...

On January 2nd, Soviets' Lunik 1 spacecraft breaks the Earth's gravitational pull. Later in the year, we would be introduced to the idea of civilization on other planets and "Interstellar Communication".

There were breakthroughs in music ... Miles Davis recorded "Kind of Blue"; Dave Brubeck developed and displayed new musical rhythms in his recording "Time Out"; Ornette Coleman and his jazz quartet redefined the shape of Jazz = all of these musicians changed the shape of Jazz for the future and for the better!

Unfortunately, the country also saw more racism and it wasn't just in the south. Miles Davis was "attacked" by two (2) policemen in New York while outside on a break from the club where he was performing.

Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro both visited the US in 1959. The "cold war" may have ended sooner if ... (p. 112-113).

On July 8, 1959, six of the eight US military advisers in Hoa Binh -- a tree-lined provincial center twenty miles NE of Saigon -- were shot in their mess hall after dinner. Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand were killed in the attack. They were the first of 58,217 Americans who would die over the next 16 years in Vietnam.

Nobody knew it at the time, but 1959 marked the start of what came to be called the 2nd Indochina War.

"Open Door Imperialism" -- a revisionist view of the US Foreign Policy was "reborn" in a book written by University of Wisconsin in Madison professor, William Appleman Williams in his book, "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy".

"The New Language of Diplomacy" begins on pg. 125. This whole chapter is very interesting and explains a lot about how things worked an continue to work in the US State Dept.

Towards the end of the year John Howard Griffin began his trip to the Deep South, disguised as a black man, for his book "Black Like Me". The "lessons" he learned and the knowledge he acquired is scary.

On November 19,1959, Ford Motor Company announced that it was shutting down production of the Edsel after only two (2) years on the market. The Edsel was also known as the "E-car" -- Experimental car during its development phase, in which Ford had invested $400 million. To the public, Edsel stood for "Every Day Something Else Leaks". Ford had expected to sell 200,000 Edsels the first year; in fact, it sold 63,100. The second year's figures were more abysmal and the company lost $250 million.

The Edsel had been developed in flush times, but now the economy was in recession (sound familiar?). The International Auto Show in New York in April, took up one-third more floor space than the previous year's show and featured cars made by 65 companies in 9 foreign countries ... Sales of a squat German car called the Volkswagen were skyrocketing and for the first time, Japanese cars were on display, including the new brands Toyota and Datsun.

According to Kapland, the Edsel's demise marked the first sign of many to come that Detroit could no longer dominate its market, any more than Washington could dictate the world. Do you really think we've learned this lesson?

But just at this moment of incipient decline, a different sort of factory was rising up, a musical assembly line called Motown -- a wordplay on "Motor" City -- that would transform the culture of the nation and the world ...

An impressive book that encourages us to ask questions of our own!