Kaplan, Fred M. 1959: the year that changed everything. (2009). Hoboken, N.J. : J. Wiley & Sons.
It was the year, as Mr. Kaplan's handy timeline reminds us, that Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Berry Gordy started Motown records in Detroit, Allen Ginsberg recited "Howl" at Columbia, the Pioneer spacecraft blasted off, the dirtiest version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was published, Toyota and Datsun (now Nissan) made their American debuts and Ford mercy-killed the Edsel, the microchip was introduced, the first U.S. soldiers were killed in Vietnam, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opened, Martin Luther King went to India to study nonviolence, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and Searle sought approval to sell the first birth-control pill, Enovid. In sum, a year "when the world as we now know it began to take form."
Some of Mr. Kaplan's strongest chapters deal with the evolution of Dr. King and the man who seemed to some his evil twin, Malcolm X, the Black Muslim apostate, and the civil-rights rebellion that gained momentum after the first lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro, N.C., a month into the 1960s. The author gives credit to the now all-but-forgotten September 1959 report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a chart-laden, 668 pages that meticulously documented the scope of racial discrimination in America. Southern senators immediately tried to kill the commission. "Isn't a segregated life the proper life?" asked Mississippi's Jim Eastland. "Isn't it the law of nature?"
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