Single-Year Books

I’m about halfway through Ronald Brownstein’s book Rock Me on the Water, about 1974 in Los Angeles. It mixes coverage of movies, music, television, and politics (as per the stemwinder of a subtitle) and attempts to make a case that 1974 was a particularly pivotal year for America, with many of the forces for change coming from L.A.

It’s striking just how little the book is about 1974. To introduce, for instance, All in the Family, the sitcom that headed a historically great Saturday night TV lineup that year, we get pages and pages of background about producer Norman Lear, about the studio heads who approved the show, about the actors and writers, and so on. That’s probably how it should be: Any big event will have causes that trace many years further back.

Properly treating the subjects like this, though, casts doubt on the argument. If the roots of a breakthrough movie lay 2, 3, 5, or 10 years in the past, which is the pivotal date? 50 years on, it doesn’t matter exactly when something happened. Even Brownstein acknowledges that, mixing coverage of famous films that were filmed, written, and conceived in 1974 with those that were actually released in his chosen year. Wouldn’t a better book drop the single-year gimmick and properly work out the sequence of events that led to the milestone?

I don’t know, but I do know that covering a single year without drowning in background is hard. I just completed my (considerably less-ambitious) 1973 Redux, about one tennis season. Even with short stand-alone vignettes, I often fought the urge to stop, jump back a decade, and bring the story up to date with several paragraphs of context. Presumably single-year concepts are easier for sports than other topics: A sporting season really is self-contained within a several-month period, even if the stories of the principal figures are not.

There’s also the danger of the opposite problem: a book with too little background, usually drawing heavily on newspaper research. Plenty of authors spend too much time in the archives, then report each twist and turn of the story as it appeared to contemporary readers. (Here again, writing about sports is an advantage, as those twists remain interesting, at least to readers who care about the subject.)

Clearly, the gimmick isn’t going away. One Goodreads user came up with a list of 46 books purporting to be the history of a single year from 69 AD to 1968. (There’s also a book about 1177 B.C., which is particularly imprecise by its very nature.) It’s an unusual case in which you’d rather an author doesn’t follow through too exactly on their title. Writing about the momentousness of one year is more difficult than it sounds.