1961: Books and Literature

Feb13

The National Book Award goes to The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter.
Some other nominees were:
John Knowles for A Separate Peace
Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird
Wright Morris for Ceremony in Lone Tree
Flannery O’Connor for The Violent Bear It Away
John Updike for Rabbit, Run
Interesting choice with that sort of line-up.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Ivo Andric wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Who’s he?)

Published in 1961:
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. I’m not a Dahl fan, but this one and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are still quite popular.
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I read some Heinlein when I was a teenager, including this one, I think, but I don’t remember much about it. I do know that Heinlein’s book is the origin of the term “grok” that became somewhat popular in the 60’s and 70’s, In Stranger in a Strange Land, “grok” literally means “to drink” and figuratively means “to comprehend”, “to love”, and “to be one with”. “I grok you” means “I get it” or “I’m with you.”
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Set during World II, the title also introduced a new term to popular parlance: “catch-22”. The catch-22 is explained to be how any pilot requesting a psych evaluation hoping to be found not sane enough to fly, and thereby escape dangerous missions, would thereby demonstrate his sanity. If you’re sane enough not to want to fly combat missions, the army air corps says you’re sane enough to fly them.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. We read Phantom Tollbooth aloud last year in school. I highly recommend it.
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Eldest Daughter really appreciates Walker Percy. I’m not there yet. I just don’t grok him.
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. On the other hand, I think Irving Stone is underestimated as a writer. I remember liking this one, a biographical novel of Michaelangelo, and Lust for Life, about da Vinci. Stone also wrote one of my favorite nonfiction history books, Men To Match My Mountains, about the opening and settlement of the far western United States.
Mila 18 by Leon Uris. Wonderfully compelling novel about the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

1963: Events and Inventions

Feb13

January 14, 1963. George C. Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. In his inaugural speech, he defiantly proclaims “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”

April 7, 1963. Yugoslavia is proclaimed to be a socialist republic, and Josip Broz Tito is named President for Life.

May 15, 1963. NASA launches astronaut Gordon Cooper on Mercury 9, the last mission for the Mercury program. Cooper lands in the Pacific after 22 orbits of the earth in his Mercury capsule.

June 3, 1963. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam pours chemicals on the heads of Buddhist protestors. The United States threatens to cut off aid to Ngo Dinh Diem’s government in South Vietnam. Dinh Diem’s forces continue to persecute Buddhists, vandalizing Buddhist pagodas and arresting Buddhist priests.

June 16, 1963. Vostok 6 carries Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

August 8, 1963. The Great Train Robbery of 1963 takes place in Buckinghamshire, England. 2.6 million pounds in used banknotes is stolen from the Glasgow-to-London mail train. Although several of the thieves are eventually caught, the bulk of the money is never recovered.

August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his I Have A Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of at least 250,000 protestors.

November 2-6, 1963. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem is assassinated following a military coup. Coup leader General Duong Van Minh takes over as leader of South Vietnam.

November 14, 1963. A volcanic eruption on the ocean floor near Iceland creates a new island, Surtsey.

November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Also on this day, author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis dies at his home, the Kilns in England, and the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. dies in hospital, also in England. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.

December 12, 1963. Kenya becomes independent from British rule, with Jomo Kenyatta as prime minister.

Children’s nonfiction for 1963: We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March by Cynthia Levinson. Reviewed at Ms. Yingling Reads.

1962: Events and Inventions

Feb12

January 9, 1962. Cuba and the Soviet Union sign a trade pact.

January 13, 1962. Albania allies itself with the People’s Republic of China.

February, 1962. President imposes an embargo on the importation of Cuban goods into the United States.

February 20, 1962. Astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the earth. Either the movie, The Right Stuff, or Tom Wolfe’s 1979 novel from which the movie was adapted would be a good introduction to the early years of the U.S. space program.

March 1, 1962. The S. S. Kresge Company opens its first K-mart discount store in Garden City, Michigan.

July 1, 1962. Rwanda and Burundi in south central Africa separate into two countries and gain independence from Belgium. In Rwanda, Rwandan Hutu attack the Tutsi and massacre them by the thousands. Many Rwandan Tutsi escape to Burundi and Uganda.

July 3, 1962. The French president Charles de Gaulle “solemnly recognizes” the independence of Algeria. After 132 years of French rule, Algeria is an independent nation.

October, 1962. Amnesty International, an organization set up to investigate human rights abuses around the world, is formed.

October 15-28, 1962. Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy receives information that the Soviet is constructing missile sites in Cuba to house missiles aimed at the United States. Kennedy imposes a naval quaratine around Cuba to prevent the delivery and deployment of Soviet missiles. Khrushchev demands the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for Soviet missiles in Cuba. THe U.S. agrees to guarantee no invasion of Cuba if the Soviets will remove the missiles. Crisis averted.

December, 1962. The U.S. space probe Mariner II sends back the first close-up pictures of the planet Venus.

The Devil in Pew Number Seven by Rebecca Nichols Alonzo

Feb10

I am in a quandary. I don’t want to discourage anyone form reading this memoir, a true story that carries a wonderful message about the necessity of forgiveness, even in the direst of circumstances.

However, to be honest, the book could have been edited down to about half or three-fourths of its almost 300 pages and not have lost a thing. If you’re a good skimmer, you’ll really appreciate this story of a pastor and his family terrorized and very nearly destroyed by a man who acts like the devil incarnate. In 1969, Robert Nichols moved with his family to Sellerstown, North Carolina to serve as pastor of the Free Welcome Holiness Church. As the name of the church indicated, the Nichols family was welcomed by the community, except for one man, Mr. Horry James Watts, who lived across the street from the parsonage and occupied pew number seven in the Free Welcome Church every Sunday morning. The violence and harrassment began with threatening phone calls and escalated until . . . No spoilers here.

The amazing thing about the story is the ending. Could you forgive a man who threatened to make you family leave the community where you lived “crawling or walking, dead or alive?” The sction near the end of the book on forgiveness is worth the price of the book because the author speaks from hard-earned experience.

“If I allow myself to go down the pathway of rage and retaliation, several things happen, and none of them are good. Here are my top four:
My sins will not be forgiven by God if I refuse to forgive those who have sinned against me.
I miss an opportunity to show God’s love to an unforgiving world.
I’m the one who remains in jail when I withhold God’s grace by failing to forgive.
If I have trouble forgiving, it might be because I’m actually angry at God, not at the person who wronged me.”

So, I’m recommending this book with the caveat that you’re not to expect deathless prose, just a riveting and inspiring story of nitty-gritty forgiveness and even joy in very difficult circumstances.

1961: Events and Inventions

Feb8

January 3, 1961. President Dwight Eisenhower announces the severing of diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba.

January 17, 1961. Imprisoned former prime minister Patrice Lumumba of Republic of Congo is executed by firing squad. The CIA, the Belgian authorities in Congo, and the president of Congo, President Tshombe, may all have been involved in Lumumba’s death. “We are not Communists, Catholics, Socialists. We are African nationalists.” ~Patrice Lumumba.

January 31, 1961. The United States sends a monkey named Ham 150 miles into space in a Mercury capsule. Ham safely splashes down and receives an apple as a reward for his performance as the first monkey astronaut.

April 12, 1961. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits the earth and becomes the first human in space.

April 19, 1961. The United States sponsors and funds 1500 Cuban exiles in an invasion of Cuba at The Bay of Pigs. The invasion fails, and President Kennedy and Soviet premier Krushchev warn one another not to interfere in the internal affairs of Cuba.

June 16, 1961. The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over the tiny sheikdom of Kuwait, and Iraq claims the territory as part of Iraq. Kuwait successfully resists Iraq and remains independent.

August 13-31, 1961. East German authorities build a huge wall of concrete blocks and electric fences and barbed wire separating East and West Berlin. Since the post World War II partition of Germany, more than two million Germans have fled East Germany into the West.

September 28, 1961. A military coup in Damascus, Syria effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria.

October 1, 1961. The formerly British Southern Cameroons unites with French Cameroun to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon.

November 18, 1961. U.S. President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.

December 9, 1961. Tanganyika gains independence and declares itself a republic, with Julius Nyerere as its first President.

1960: Events and Inventions

Feb7

January 1, 1960. French Cameroon becomes an independent country.

January 9, 1960. President Nasser lays the foundation stone of the Aswan High Dam as work begins on the engineering marvel on the Nile River in Egypt.

March 21, 1960. In the black township of Sharpeville in Transvaal, South Africa, local white police officers open fire on demonstrators who are protesting apartheid laws in South Africa. Sixty-nine people are killed and 186 are left wounded. Police Commander D.H. Pienaar is quoted: “If the natives do these things, they must learn their lesson the hard way.”

April 19, 1960. Labor and student groups overthrow the autocratic First Republic of South Korea under Syngman Rhee. This revolution leads to the peaceful resignation of Rhee and the transition to the Second Republic.

April 21, 1960. The planned futuristic city of Brasilia becomes the capital of Brazil. The picture above is central Brasilia in 1986.

April 27, 1960. Togo gains independence from France.

May 1, 1960. Several Soviet surface-to-air missiles shoot down an American Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Its pilot, CIA agent Francis Gary Powers, is captured.

May 11, 1960. In Buenos Aires, four Israeli Mossad agents abduct the fugitive Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, in order that he could be taken to Israel and put on trial. Eichmann is later convicted and executed.

July 1, 1960. The UK- and Italian-ruled territories of Somaliland gain their independence and unite to form the nation of Somalia.

October 1, 1960. Nigeria declares their independence from the United Kingdom and becomes a member of the British Commonwealth.

1959: Events and Inventions

Feb7

January 2, 1959. President Fulgencio Batista of Cuba flees the country to take refuge in the Dominican Republic, as rebels take over the government of Cuba in a coup. The new president of Cuba is Dr. manuel Urrutia, but rebel leader Fidel Castro holds the power in the new government in his position as premier.

January 3, 1959. Alaska becomes the 49th and largest state in the United States.

April 19, 1959. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, finds refuge in India after fleeing Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Chinese troops have put down a rebellion in Tibet that was an attempt to wrest Tibetan independence from the Chinese Communist government in Beijing. The Dalia Lama left Tibet secretly in March and traveled over the mountains by yak into India.

June 3, 1959. Singapore becomes a self-governing crown colony of Britain with Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister.

July, 1959. The Australian airline Quantas makes its first flight across the Pacific from Sydney to the U.S.

August 21, 1959. Hawaii becomes the 50th state in the United States.

September 25, 1959. The prime minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Simon Bandaranaike, dies from his wounds after being shot by a Buddhist monk.

October 7, 1959. A Soviet space probe sends back the first-ever photographs of the dark side of the moon.

December 1, 1959. Twelve countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, sign an agreement not to claim any part of Antarctica for themselves. Military bases and the dumping of nuclear waste in Antarctica are banned by the treaty. However, scientists of all nationalities will be allowed free access to the continent to conduct experiments and research in the areas climate, geology, wildlife, and other subjects.

December, 1959. Archbishop Markarios, leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, becomes the first president of the new republic of Cyprus. Cyprus gained its independence from the United Kingdom in August, 1959.

1958: Events and Inventions

Feb6

January 31, 1958. The first successful American satellite, Explorer 1, is launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

February 1, 1958. Egypt and Syria unite to form the United Arab Republic. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser will be president of the U.A.R. until Syria secedes in 1961.

May, 1958. In Algeria, 40,000 French settlers riot in protest against the French government’s agreement to give Algeria its independence.

June 16, 1958. Two years after the Hungarian uprising against Soviet control of their country, former Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who sympathized with the rebels, is hanged for treason. Hungarians are angry but powerless to resist the Soviet-influenced Communists who control the country.

July 14, 1958. King Faisal of Iraq and Jordan, his son the crown prince and the prime minister of Iraq are all murdered n a military coup, and a republic is established.

July 29, 1958. The U.S. Congress formally creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

October, 1958. The USSR agrees to loan money to Egypt to build the Aswan High Dam across the Nile River in Aswan, Egypt.

November 28, 1958. Chad, the Republic of the Congo, and Gabon become autonomous republics within the French Community.

December 21, 1958. General Charles de Gaulle is elected president of France for a term of seven years. The major issue facing his government is whether or not to grant Algerian independence. French settlers in Algeria want the colony to remain under French rule, but Algerian nationalists are fighting for independence.

December 29, 1958. Rebel troops under Che Guevara begin to invade Santa Clara, Cuba. President Fulgencio Batista resigns two days later, on the night of the 31st.

1957: Events and Inventions

Feb6

January 3, 1957. Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.

January 20, 1957. Israel withdraws from the Sinai Peninsula (captured from Egypt on October 29, 1956).

March 14, 1957. President Sukarno declares martial law in Indonesia. Sukarno continues to consolidate his power in Indonesia until he is made President for Life in 1963.

March 25, 1957. Six nations—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg–set up the European Common Market or European Economic Community.

July 25, 1957. Tunisia becomes a republic, with Habib Bourguiba its first president.

August, 1957. Malaya receives its independence from the United Kingdom and elects its first president, Abdul Rahman.

September 22, 1957. Dr. FranÃ§ois Duvalier (Papa Doc) comes to power in an election in Haiti. He later declares himself president for life, and rules until his death in 1971.

October 4, 1957. The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth.

November 3, 1957. The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2, with a dog called Laika on board, the first animal sent into orbit.

December 20, 1957. The Boeing 707 airliner flies for the first time.

1957: Books and Literature

Feb1

The National Book Award goes to a book called The Field of Vision by Wright Morris.

Albert Camus wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel) publishes The Cat in the Hat, using only 236 simple words. The story, about a subversive cat who brings chaos into two children’s rainy day but then manages to resolve the problem before mom comes home, is an instant classic.

Published in 1957:
Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot. Mrs. Elliot tells the story of her husband, Jim Elliot, and the other men who in attempting to make contact with the Waorani Indians in Ecuador were killed by the very people they came to help.

Kids Say the Darndest Things by Art Linkletter. Art Linkletter had a daytime TV show, a talk show called House Party, and at the end of each show he had a panel of children that he talked with and interviewed.

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie. Aren’t trains romantic? Several of Agatha Christie’s novels involved trains, train travel, death on a train, even romance on a train.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’ve never read it, even though road trips are one of my many fascinations. The New York Times hailed it as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat”. I’m just not interested in drug-hazy memories of taking drugs while driving across country looking for more drugs.

The Guns of Navarone by Alistair McLean. We watched the movie based on this book a few months ago, and it felt really hokey and unbelievable. I remember the book as a better experience, but I read it a really long time ago.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss.

On the Beach by Nevill Shute. Semicolon review here.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I’m not an Ayn fan. Has anyone else here read it?

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. I read this book when my mom was taking the aforementioned Jewish literature class, but I was too young to get it.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. My opinion of this very long Russian romance is the same as her opinion, without the cursewords.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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