1959: The Year Everything Changed

Fred Kaplan, 1959: TheYear Everything Changed, John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 307 Pages

This book maintains that 1959 was a pivotal year. Many changes began that year and this book furnishes a short exposure to them. I read this book because of a reference to it in the WSJ as well as my curiosity to revisit the year I was a senior in high school. I find that I had little awareness of most of these items during their supposed genesis; I find I now have very little interest in many of the listed items. Some items having the most influence and which I found most interesting are: the birth-control pill, the toppling of obscenity laws, microchips, the space race, the emergence of Castro, the character who inspired Dr. Strangelove, and, finally, Malcolm X. On the other hand, I believe much too much time is spent discussing Motown, the Beat generation, Norman Mailer, Lenny Bruce &jazz musicians.

I do not particularly recommend this book. The subjects I believe are important each need a book to adequately explain; the other subjects are just tedious for me to get through.

So, on to my next book: “Collapse: How Societies Chose To Fail Or Succeed” by Jared Diamond. My brother Joe recommended this particular book some time ago.

My Notes:
Pg. 5-6: The distribution of global power—which once let American policy makers get by with little knowledge about Russia and maybe China—began dispersing in the late fifties to the point where ignorance of small countries like Vietnam and Cuba got us into deadly trouble. Today the collapse of power centers, brought on by the end of the Cold War, requires political elites to know about regional tribes, separatist enclaves, stateless terrorists, to say nothing of financial ineterdependencies, climate change, energy alternatives, and other aspects of security that have nothing to do with traditional gauges of the military balance.

We are now in another significant cultural splintering in blogs, iTunes, eBooks, YouTube, Twitter, News Feed, Flickr, which is not only broadening further the boundaries of art but stands to shatter the final barriers between artist and audience, public and private, spectacle and life.

Pg. 67: The U.S. Strategic Air Command’s war plan all through the fifties was hair-raising. If the Soviet army invaded Western Europe, even if it did not set off a single nuclear weapon, SAC’s plan was to unleash every bomber in the fleet and drop every nuclear bomb on every target in the USSR and Red China. In 1959, that amounted to 3,423 nuclear bombs, with the power of 7,847 megatons (nearly 8 billion tons of explosive), which would probably kill 285 million Russians and Chinese and severely injure 40 million more, with incalculable casualties in Europe and elsewhere from fallout. (Is this much different than Dr. Strangelove proposed in the movie?).

Pg. 101: The basic premise of the Enlightenment was that the rise of rationality goes hand in hand with the rise of freedom. Now, however, rational organizations had grown remarkably complex; science and technology held a central place in society and culture. Yet people behaved no more reasonably, nor were they any less beholden to myth and superstition.