In July 1959, Searle sought FDA approval to market Enovid for birth control -- not, as in 1957, to treat "menstrual disorders." When finally the pill reached the market, U.S. News & World Report wondered whether it would be considered "a license for promiscuity" and "lead to sexual anarchy." The very idea of "community standards," the crux of the Chatterley decision, was becoming problematic.

Kaplan lavishes excessive attention on Norman Mailer, who today seems marginal. It is a significant datum -- signifying today's diminished importance of words -- that the poet Allen Ginsberg's 1959 recitation at Columbia University caused the sort of commotion that only a rock group could cause today. But Kaplan's judgment that Ginsberg "saw the connection between freedom from structures in poetry and freedom from structures in all of life" merely validates the axiom that everything changes except the avant garde.

More serious change was coming, born of a mundane material, silicon. On March 24, 1959, at an engineers' trade show, Texas Instruments introduced perhaps the 20th century's most transformative device, the solid integrated circuit, aka the microchip. It would help satisfy what Kaplan calls Americans' "yearning for instantaneity," a cousin of the spontaneity ("first thought, best thought" proclaimed Ginsberg) so celebrated in the next decade.

Kaplan is especially convincing concerning jazz as a leading indicator of more serious, because more disciplined, cultural enrichment. On March 2, 1959, Miles Davis began recording "Kind of Blue," perhaps the greatest jazz album. On May 4, John Coltrane recorded "Giant Steps," on May 22, Ornette Coleman recorded "The Shape of Jazz to Come" and on June 25, David Brubeck began recording "Time Out." The emancipation of jazz from what Kaplan calls "the structures of chords and pre-set rhythms" proved that meticulously practiced improvisation is not an oxymoron.

On July 8, 1959 -- two months after President Eisenhower authorized U.S. military advisers to accompany South Vietnamese units on operations -- in a hut 20 miles from Saigon, eight advisers were watching a movie. Viet Cong sprayed the room with bullets, wounding six. Two died, the first of 58,220.