Book Review: Time Traveling to 1963

Title: Time Traveling to 1963 

Author: Richard J. Thomas

Date: 2023

Publisher: Richard J. Thomas

ISBN: 9798366458412

Length: 92 pages

Quote: "[B]y 1966 the [Beatles].. decided they could no longer perform live and never toured again. The screaming drowned out the music and also made it unsafe for them to travel."

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the news items collected in this book is how many of them you might associate with years later than 1963. A lot of things that started in 1963 were still holding people's attention five, ten, or twenty years later. 

Consider the author's list of memorable books published that year. Planet of the Apes spawned a television series in 1974. Where the Wild Things Are was in use in primary schools all through the 1960s and 1970s, depending on how long it took each classroom to get a copy and wear it out. Hop on Pop is still in print today. The Feminine Mystique was recommended reading at some workplaces in the 1980s before becoming required reading for "women's history" courses. The Encyclopedia Brown books kept rolling out into the 1970s. Some of you Gentle Readers matured earlier than I did, but I read The Bell Jar in 1980, Cat's Cradle in 1983, and The Fire Next Time in 1991. 

Time Traveling to 1963 is the first (that I've seen) in a series of books intended as gifts to people born in a specific year or resources for authors writing historical fiction about it. If your characters are stuck for conversation, and it's still only September of 1963, you might have them flip on the radio and catch one of the songs that were being played in memory of a recently deceased singer like Edith Piaf, or speculate about the psychological mechanisms that caused teenaged girls to scream at the Beatles, or talk about one of the sports events that...read the book.

Because these books are full of big splashy nostalgia-inducing pictures, the three review copies from this series that the author tried to send me snagged in the e-mail and almost got destroyed as spam. They snagged in the spam-destroying mechanism, too! Once retrieved from the spam folder the e-books behaved quite nicely as PDF files in Microsoft Edge, but you'll want printed copies, anyway, to pass around and reminisce about. Every family includes someone who remembers 1963.

That would be the whole year. Most of the news items of 1963 took place before the big, heavy story in November; most of what people saw in the news media was cheerful content encouraging them to buy stuff. There's a whole chapter of "Iconic Ads."