RobKirkpatrick.com

While grateful for all the attention I’ve gotten for my “other” two books from last year, I think my Cecil Travis book (published in a new Bison Books edition in ‘09 by the University of Nebraska Press) has somewhat gotten lost in the shuffle.  So check out the mini bio for this Washington Senators All-Star from the 1930s and ’40s that I contributed to the SABR Baseball Biography Project:  

http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=v&v=l&bid=597&pid=14327

…Then, if you’d like to know more, click on the BOOKS link at the top of my site and pick your online vendor of choice.

- Rob

If you’re looking for a good book about the late ’60s – one that I didn’t even write – check out Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by O.C. journalist Nick Schou:

http://us.macmillan.com/orangesunshine

Schou’s book just received a “four cannabis review” from High Times, author Mike Davis says this true story reads “like classic Thomas Pynchon,” and yours truly blurbed it by saying it’s a “wild ride of a story that seems straight out of Easy Rider or Zabriskie Point.”

Orange Sunshine is available now for pre-order on Amazon.

Valleys of Neptune, an album of a dozen previously unreleased studio tracks from Jimi Hendrix, is set for release in March from Sony/Legacy. Here’s Edna Gundersen’s piece for USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2010-01-11-jimialbum11_ST_N.htm?csp=34

I spoke to Gundersen in October 2008 for an article she did on Mark Oliver Everett’s memoir, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, which I published at my day job:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-10-20-mark-everett_N.htm

Magic in the Night got a mention in a blog called Madmen, Drummers, Bummers and Indians in the Summer.  As far as back-handed compliments go, it’s one of the best ones you can get:

I have finished Rob Kirkpatrick’s “Magic in the Night”, which is one of the better Springsteen related books I’ve yet read. Kirkpatrick is about 97% less full of crap than most music critics, so kudos to him. 

Here’s the link: http://coxrox.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/three-more-that-snuck-into-2009/

(…with apologies to Public Enemy.)

I intended this to be a letter appearing in the Washington Post, but it doesn’t appear that they’ll be printing it, so I’m posting it here…

1969 vs. 1968?

In response to Carlos Lozada’s comments on my book in his article “2009 is over. But is it history?”, I want to clarify that I did not say I “might have called the book ‘1969: The Year After the Important Year.’” As I explain in my introduction, this was a joke made by a colleague, which I recalled to note the glut of books on 1968 and the gap that I sought to fill with mine.

Mr. Lozada argued that I “must outdo 1968” and incidents such as the Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon. I take it, then, he does not see the significance of a year that witnessed People’s Park, the Stonewall Riots, the Manson Family killings, the War Moratorium, the Days of Rage, the occupation of Alcatraz, the public’s discovery of the My Lai massacre, and the killing of Fred Hampton? Or the importance of Nixon’s inaugural year, in which he escalated the war in Southeast Asia with covert bombings in Cambodia and drew lines in the sand with his famous “Silent Majority” address to the nation?

“When you need the Miracle Mets and the first modern ATM to boost your case, you know you’re in trouble,” writes Mr. Lozada. If he disagrees that the Miracle Mets (which he can reference 40 years later without needing to explain who they were) transcended the sports world, would he also question the importance of another event from baseball that year: Curt Flood’s announcement that he was challenging baseball’s reserve clause, thus signaling the onset of free agency?

If Mr. Lozada isn’t impressed with how the invention of the ATM changed the ways in which he conducts his financial transactions today, does he not believe that the maiden Boeing 747 flight, the first artificial heart implant, and the first computer network connection introduced major changes into modern life?  (Without that last item, I would not have found myself 40 years later reading Mr. Lozada’s article at home on my laptop.)  And, of course, there was a small technological achievement called Apollo 11.

While Mr. Lozada maintains I was applying the “Groundwork Argument” to substitute for a supposed lack of “historical moments,” I would suggest that recent History channel documentaries such as Woodstock: Now & Then and Sex in ’69: The Sexual Revolution in America (for which I was interviewed), as well as NPR’s humor piece on 40th anniversary “burnout,” seem to indicate others agree with my opinion that 1969 was indeed an important year with a unique legacy in America society.

Rob Kirkpatrick
Author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed

Here’s the article to which I’m responding:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121102590.html

Last week I posted a link to a theologian’s blog, in which he listed 1969: The Year Everything Changed among his best books of the year.  Today, I just came across this posting on An Atheist’s Answer, where the book is listed as one of five nonfiction books to buy instead of the Bible:

http://atheistsanswer.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/good-books/ 

Wow.  No pressure there.

It had me wondering: If I made like John Lennon and declared myself “bigger than Jesus,” would the ensuing book burnings help drive sales?  Whatever helps move stock…

If you have a Kindle, you can put 1969: The Year Everything Changed on it.

Order the Kindle Edition at:

http://www.amazon.com/1969-Year-Everything-Changed-ebook/dp/B0031Y7O5G/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

1969: The Year Everything Changed got an honorable mention of sorts in fellow Huffington Post blogger Laurence Hughes’s tongue-in-cheek list on The 10 Best Years That Are Books:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurence-hughes/the-10-best-years-that-ar_b_397174.html

Nice idea re: 1964, but he must have missed Jon Margolis’s The Last Innocent Year.

And here’s 1969 in someone’s “best of 2009″ list – admittedly a more surprising inclusion, but also appreciated:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2009/12/19/sam-stormss-top-10-books-of-2009/

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) posted an interesting Q&A with multimedia artist Sam Durant and documentary filmmaker Sam Green, who discussed 1969 and their work inspired by the Altamont Free Concert. Curator Jenée Misraje mentions my book and asks about the cultural resonance of 1969:

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/12/altamont/

I appreciated Misraje’s observation that “Artists, curators and historians have been placing a greater amount of attention to this time in history [1969]” and Durant’s suggestion that “1969 haunts the U.S. more than 1968.”  I especially appreciated their discussion given Carlos Lozada’s recent piece in The Washington Post, in which he argues I had to ”outdo 1968″:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121102590.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1

Perhaps for some people, the amazing slew of events from 1969 to which we still look back is not that big a deal. This Post writer seems to imply 1959 was the more momentous year, yet strangely I did not see many 50th anniversary celebrations this past year. 

The quote he cites from my Introduction is presented out of context, but I have a letter into the Post about this…

The late Ted Kennedy writes of the Chappaquiddick incident in his forthcoming autobiography, True Compass.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/09/02/2009-09-02_sen_ted_kennedy_wrote_chappaquiddick_haunts_me_every_day_of_my_life_in_true_comp.html

Nothing really surprising here, as this is basically what he said 40 years ago in a nationally televised statement, just a few days after the moon landing.  It was a week like no other in the history of American broadcast news.

- Rob