A mentor (the incredible Tom Gardner; if anyone’s considering grad work in English and wants to be proximate to one of he world’s best humans, consider VTech) and I were talking about dream classes we’d like to teach. “1922,” he said and mentioned just a few of the books of great import that hit that year (Ulysses and The Waste Land to name the most obvious two). I mentioned ’68–the music alone from that year’d validate the class, to say nothing of the books, movies, and political restlessness. There have, of course, been all sorts of books about these things: Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution considers the Oscar nominations for Best Picture, 1968, as a jumping-off point for how cinema shifted thereafter (plus there’s Kurlanksy’s 1968, which attempts to box up that pivotal year [enter dismissive self-love comment re: boomers here]), and of course Halberstam told great baseball stories by picking certain critical years (’49, ’68), plus of course there’s the damn-near-perfect Ladies and Gentlemen the Bronx is Burning, Mahler’s masterpiece examination of the year 1977 in the big bad wolf of NYC.
The dicey aspects of this history-by-the-year conception are apparent quickly: the events which may qualify a year’s significance are rarely perfectly objective, or as calendrically clear-cut as we’d wish. For instance: 2008 was a massive year, politically; however, wouldn’t the canny nonfiction writer propose that, in fact, 2008 was the direct result of, say, 2004, and Obama’s speech at the DNC? Or of whatever year Obama moved to Chicago? Plus there’s the whole question of what makes something significant: one could write a good argumentative piece that Michael J Fox is a defining human/actor for a huge chunk of late-Gen-X folks (those of us who came of age in the ’80s) and that his career trajectory–Alex P Keaton to Marty McFly to Teenwolf to the McInenerny character in Bright Lights to Spin City to his current standing as a crusader for Parkinson’s research–says something crucial about us; if one were to make that argument, one’d be wise to focus on the year 1985 as the year of MJFox.
Of course, if you believe focusing exclusively on MJFox is a tad ridiculous, I’d encourage you to consider and/or bear in mind that we’re in a cultural moment in which surprising causality’s a huge draw + seller (hi there Freakonomics or Gladwell’s earlier stuff). Surprising causality, of course, has always had some level of popularity (all the best stories are leavened with pinched of surprise, dashes of serendipity), but we seem now to be at a moment in which old notions of causality are especially suspect–we seem, culturally, far more interested in believing that how the world actually appears and shakes out has more to do with unseen forces than with those elements which have been designed toward a specific end (consider the surge of influence of Sabermetrics in baseball, or the radically strange and/or interesting economic notions [supply side, tricke-down] that we’re willing to try to believe). Maybe it’s just me, but it does seem we’re living a pretty decidedly un-Occam moment.
All of which is just to say that books which consider specific years as particularly pregnant with cultural payloads can be toughly interesting, if not always totally satisfying. Under consideration today are two books, The House that Ruth Built by Robert Weintraub and Fire and Rain by David Browne, each of which consider a single ‘scene’ and single year–the Yankees in 1923, four music groups in 1970, respectively. Here’s where things get dicey: above I listed several books which tracked cultural and political life in 1968; 1968 was, we’ve all sort of agreed, a big year–Mexico City, Paris, Czechoslovakia, SDS + Columbia in NYC, BeatlesHendrixWarholetc.etc.etc. Ahem: was a big year and is, still, for the influence it’s exerted on culture since. Tom Gardner, the professor who wanted to teach on ’22, could make as solid a claim: the art of ’22 still rings, like a distant but significant bell. Lately there’s been a shelfload of books arguing the political importance of ’89 (the fall of the Berlin Wall, which by 2 years presaged the dissolution of the USSR) and, of course, time will tell whether ’89 ends up as historically significant year as, say, ’45 or ’68 or, some would argue, 2001.
The trickiness inherent in this stuff should be getting clear: an argument about any year’s significance is automatically premised on certain aspects of subjectivity–one person’s Pivotal Year is another person’s Who Cares (all my friends and I’d argue ’91 was a massive year for music–The Year Punk Broke and all that–but I’m 100% sure that’s because of the arbitrary dates of our births; anyone’s likely to believe the music of his or her teens is magically, lastingly significant). All of which is to say that David Browne’s argument regarding the significance of the musical developments of 1970–the rise of James Taylor, the (belated) dissolution of the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel and CSNY both exhibiting the push/pull of artistic temperaments we’ve all come to accept and to some degree expect–plays, to a degree, and makes certain sense. Will you finish this book and fundamentally think about music differently? Probably not. Is there just as compelling an argument to be made that the real critical music from 1970 that’s still gravitationally significant is Zeppelin’s III or Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter? Yes. I don’t mean this stuff as criticism, necessarily: Browne’s book’s readable as hell, and mostly enjoyable (though there are some details you’ll probably drift on encountering), but the book jacket claim that Browne’s book “examines a pivotal, transitional…year that was as important as the much-studied 1968 and 1969” doesn’t hold up. I’d like to note, too, that Browne admits, in the press packet this book arrived with, that he was a teenager in 1970, and that this book began, as these often do, autobiographically enough (it’s not for nothing that Kurlanksy’s a boomer; ’68 may have been a critical year, but the dude was 20 that year–of course it was significant for him).
Weintraub’s The House that Ruth Built doesn’t suffer these problems in quite the same way: Weintraub’s focused on the year 1923 in the life of the Yankees–they won the World Series, it was Ruth’s first Great Year as a Yank, and they opened the new Yankee Stadium in April of that year as well (not for nothing, it was Gehrig’s rookie year, even if only played a handful of games that year). Weintraub’s book, unsurprisingly, will read easiest for those who are either die-hard baseball fans or die-hard Yankee fans (which are not necessarily totally overlapping circles, in Venn Diagram terms). Thankfully, Weintraub’s book is actually a microhistory within a microhistory: he’s not arguing that the ’23 Yankees are a touchstone for understanding fundamentals of American Democracy or anything like that; he’s just making a compelling, articulate argument that ’23 deserves a hallowed place in Yankees lore. Given that there are more books about the Yankees than any three other baseball teams combined, Weintraub’s book may be mildly excessive, sure (and ironic, given that in ’09 the Yanks moved to their new stadium), but the book is great good fun, and though the scope of its ambition is grand, the argument’s welcome and refreshing for its modesty.