1959; The Year Everything Changed
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xii, [1], 322 pages. Timeline. Notes. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page--For General (Doctor) David Petraeus--Great Soldier, Scholar, American with many thanks and much respect Fred Kaplan 3 Sept 2011. Fred M. Kaplan (born July 4, 1954) is an American author and journalist. His weekly "War Stories" column for Slate magazine covers international relations and U.S. foreign policy. He received a Ph.D. (1983) in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1982, he contributed to "War and Peace in the Nuclear Age," a Sunday Boston Globe Magazine special report on the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race that received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1983. His book on the individuals who created American nuclear strategy in the late 1940s and '50s, The Wizards of Armageddon, won the Washington Monthly Political Book of the Year award. He published Daydream Believers in 2008, a work which analyzes the George W. Bush administration's use of Cold War tactics in post-9/11 military activities. In late 2012, Kaplan published The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, which examines how General David Petraeus attempted to implement new thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq regarding the traditional clear and hold counter-insurgency strategy and the individuals who defined it. In 2009, he published 1959: The Year Everything Changed. The book argues that history was not changed by the counter-culture movements of the 1960s but rather by artistic, scientific, political, & economics events occurring in the year 1959. Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America. While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that followed. Pop culture exploded in upheaval with the rise of artists like Jasper Johns, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Miles Davis. Court rulings unshackled previously banned books. Political power broadened with the onset of Civil Rights laws and protests. The sexual and feminist revolutions took their first steps with the birth control pill. America entered the war in Vietnam, and a new style in superpower diplomacy took hold. The invention of the microchip and the Space Race put a new twist on the frontier myth. Vividly chronicles 1959 as a vital, overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion, spearheading immense political, scientific, and cultural change
Strong critical acclaim: ""Energetic and engaging"" (Washington Post); ""Immensely enjoyable . . . a first-rate book"" (New Yorker); ""Lively and filled with often funny anecdotes"" (Publishers Weekly). Draws fascinating parallels between the country in 1959 and today
Drawing fascinating parallels between the country in 1959 and today, Kaplan offers a smart, cogent, and deeply researched take on a vital, overlooked period in American history. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Fidel Castro, Beat Generation, Abstract Expressionism, Civil Rights, Jazz, Free Speech, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Gap, Obscenity, Racism, Discrimination, Space Exploration, Frank Lloyd Wright
ISBN: 9780470387818
[Book #82508]
Price: $175.00