The Morning News

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

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Back in the Day • What a Year It Was!

Book Cover Former Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe Fred Kaplan (who also writes for Slate) can be forgiven for the hyperbolic claim of the subtitle in 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Wiley), as there are at least two other books that pretty much claim the same thing—and, after all, overheated rhetoric has not yet been made a crime (though it would be fitting to give law and order types a taste of what they ladle out). Plus, I personally hate to quibble with a fellow admirer of the greatness of Miles Davis’s landmark recording Kind of Blue.

Kaplan’s list of landmarks, benchmarks, high times, and transformations serves to picture that year and the late ’50s and early ’60s as a quaint movie set. A partial list includes the launch of the Soviet Union’s Lunik I space capsule, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (a precursor of the me journalism he would later perfect in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago), hip (then referred to as “sick”) comedians Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, the rise of Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the beat generation’s advance guard, the triumph of the Cuban (or at least Fidel Castro’s) Revolution, the recording of the above-mentioned classic from Miles Davis, the publication of William Appleman Williams’s seminal tome, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, photographer Robert Frank’s iconic monograph The Americans (with an introduction by Jack Kerouac), the founding of Motown Records by Berry Gordy—and, oh yeah, Jack St. Clair Kilby’s invention of the microchip.

Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) concises masterfully, “Take a ride on the New Frontier with Fred Kaplan, your insightful (and hip) guide to the space race, thermonuclear war, the civil rights movement, the ‘sick comics,’ the Beats, and the beginnings of the Vietnam War, all to a soundtrack by Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Miles, and Motown.” —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 1, 2009
Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: 1959, Back in the Day, Boston Globe, Cuba, Donald Fagen, Fidel Castro, Fred Kaplan, Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Motown, Norman Mailer, Pulitzer Prize, Robert Frank, William Appleman Williams

Reading • A Great Idea

Book Digest The decision by the Christian Science Monitor to no longer print a hard-copy version got me to thinking about my reading habits vis-à-vis that great American news appliance, the daily newspaper—and I was pushed into a state of befuddlement, realizing I had not picked up a piece of newsprint in … I cannot remember how long. The why of it I will take up another time, but in the instance of my local dailies, the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe (except for Gail Caldwell, Mark Feeney, and Katherine Powers—interesting voices all), both long ago became irrelevant to my life and cluster of habits. Considering that I began reading newspapers back in 1957, this divestiture I am sure augurs something—as in, obviously, we can take the “papers” out of “newspapers.”

Columnist Alex Beam is another reason to brave the tactile smudginess of the Globe. Beam, among other things, regularly directs elegant strokes—or, if you will, lashes of iconoclasm—at the World’s Greatest University and other ripe veins of pretense and pomposity. Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital) has a new book, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Public Affairs), which examines the so-called Great Books movement that arose in the late ‘40s and its two main proselytes, University of Chicago wunderkind president Robert Hutchins and mad-dog public intellectual-qua-philosopher Mortimer Adler.

It is indeed a lucid trip in the Wayback Machine through some of the fundamental issues regarding the nature of a liberal arts education. The creation of a Great Books canon was Hutchins’s and Adler’s answer—which in the status conscious society of mid-20th-century America became a commodity sold door to door (or as the publisher asks, “Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen?”). Among the other benefits of this smart and well-conceived intellectual excursion is a sensibility that holds librarians as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. A good fulcrum upon which to balance a worldview. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 10, 2008
Discuss This • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: Alex Beam, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Christian Science Monitor, Mortimer Adler, Public Affairs, Robert Hutchins
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