Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America (2014) Joseph Tirella (multi)


Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America by Joseph Tirella


Format: mobi/epub/azw3
Length: 360 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction/History
Date: 7 January 2014

As much a history of mid-Sixties America as it is a history of the World's Fair in Queens, New York, Joseph Tirella's entertaining and impeccably researched Tomorrow-Land brings the forces and players of that turbulent era crackling to life.

Motivated by potentially turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. The 1964-65 World's Fair was a Sixties flashpoint in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime.

In an epic narrative, Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the Fair. It fetched Disney's empire from California and Michelangelo's La Pieta from Europe; and displayed flickers of innovation from Ford, GM, and NASA--from undersea and outerspace colonies to personal computers. It housed the controversial work of Warhol (until Governor Rockefeller had it removed); and lured Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Meanwhile, the Fair--and its house band, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians--sat in the musical shadows of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who changed rock-and-roll right there in Queens. And as Southern civil rights efforts turned deadly, and violent protests also occurred in and around the Fair, Harlem-based Malcolm X predicted a frightening future of inner-city racial conflict.

Author:

Joseph Tirella wrote about Queens for The New York Times's much missed City Section, and penned pieces for the paper's Metro and Business Sections. A former Senior Editor at Fortune Small Business, his work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vibe, Esquire, Reader?s Digest, the New York Post, the Daily News, Portfolio.com, and MSN.com.