"1969" Offers Much-Needed Perspective on Today's Tumult

With Saturday's tragedy in Tuscon, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by 2011 already, and my guess is that you are, too. It's hard to escape the feeling that we are at an unsteady, scary, unnerving moment in history, in which the very ground seems to be shifting beneath our feet. The past may seem placid and safe by comparison, but that sort of nostalgia is just an illusion that our memories conjure up for comfort.

The reality is that Americans -- particularly the boomers -- have been through many such cataclysmic bursts of change and somehow collectively made it through them. In the process, the effect of those moments has become encoded in our cultural DNA.

That's why Rob Kirkpatrick's new book 1969: The Year That Everything Changed, a deft and eloquent history of the year that brought to a close a pivotal decade in many boomers' lives, is the perfect book to read right now. Kirkpatrick, a publishing house editor and Huffington Post blogger, notes in the introduction that the impact of those 12 months on America is sometimes underestimated because they came in the wake of 1968. The latter, of course, was a tsunami of violent upheaval that rocked the nation with assassinations of two youthful heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The slums of our nation's capital also burst into flames, and police and protesters fought in Chicago's streets as the rest of the nation watched on television.

But, as Kirkpatrick meticulously details, 1969 was, in some ways, much more crucial in terms of shaping the cultural identity of America in general and boomers in particular. It was the year in which we reacted to the trauma of 1968, struggled to get past it and expressed how it had changed us. But as I read the book, I found myself drawing more parallels and comparisons between 1969 and today.

It's insightful to read Kirkpatrick's recounting of the ascension in January 1969 of Richard Nixon, a president elected by a precariously narrow margin and in many ways a more polarizing political figure than anyone on the scene today. The limousine that took Nixon to his inauguration, Kirkpatrick recounts, was met by protesters who threw "sticks, stones, cans and bottles" and brandished signs accusing him of being a war criminal -- and this before he had taken a single action as president.

Similarly, Kirkpatrick revisits the April 1969 disturbance in Harvard Yard, where 500 members of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society protested the Vietnam War by seizing Harvard University's administration building and throwing the prestigious institution's officials out onto the pavement. (As one student declared, "You don't have the authority to tell me anything.") The author also reminds us of a largely forgotten but even more frightening conflict at Cornell University, in which white fraternity members and black radicals squared off, armed with crowbars, knives and shotguns. As Cornell graduate student Harry Edwards chillingly explained at the time: "I don't dig all this crap about the moderate majority. There isn't any middle of the road left in this country." One easily could imagine the same words coming out of the mouth of some cable television commentator today.

There are plenty of other disturbing moments in 1969, from the Manson and Zodiac murders to the disastrous rock festival at Altamont Speedway in California. But I don't want to give you the impression that Kirkpatrick is strictly a chronicler of the generation's darker side. He also reminds us of inspirational moments when people put aside their differences and came together, such as the Moon landing, the once-lowly New York Mets' miraculous World Series victory and the Woodstock Festival. His book reminds us that the tension of conflict also tends to push artists to create works of startling brilliance, from the musical Hair and counterculture film classic Easy Rider, to novelist Philip Roth's frank and illuminating comic exploration of the male libido, Portnoy's Complaint.

In particular, 1969 spawned an explosion of mind-altering, paradigm-shifting musical experimentation, and Kirkpatrick hits all the right notes. He covers everything from the Beatles' Abbey Road and Dusty Springfield's classic Dusty in Memphis, to Isaac Hayes' seminal record Hot Buttered Soul, which led us from 60s R&B to the soul-inflected funk of the 70s and beyond. But the author really shines by pointing out the importance of works such as jazz trumpeter Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, which radically subordinated melody to rhythm in a way that's still heard in contemporary hip hop. He also spends a lot of time on then-obscure fringe performers such as the Stooges and the MC5, whose jarring, rough-edged, frenetic sound was the genesis of a lot of the rock music being made today.

1969 is not without flaws. Kirkpatrick organizes the book according to cultural and historical themes rather than chronologically, which sacrifices some of the sense of how one event affects others that were happening at roughly the same time. He has so many events to cover that he often leaves us wishing for more narrative and additional perspectives. And the epilogue, in which he tries to show how the events of 1969 led to what would follow in the 1970s and 1980s, doesn't go quite far enough in connecting the dots. But that's okay, in the end, because I think a smart reader is capable of taking Kirkpatrick's insights about that terrible, marvelous time and using them to gain a fresh perspective on the here and now.

Here's a link to Rob Kirkpatrick's website.