On the Cusp: Days of ’62 by David Kynaston - review by Piers Brendon

Piers Brendon

That Was the Year That Was

On the Cusp: Days of ’62

By

Bloomsbury 224pp £18.99
 

Stuck in a dentist’s waiting room one morning during the summer of 1962, I read a long article in the New Yorker by Rachel Carson summarising the argument that would shortly appear in her bestseller Silent Spring. Since the magazine was best known for its humour, I naively assumed that her apocalyptic-sounding alert about the ecological catastrophe being caused by the spread of pesticides was a spoof. It was, of course, a ground-breaking exposé of mankind’s rape of Mother Nature, who may now indeed be taking her revenge in the shape of fire, flood and pestilence. David Kynaston describes Carson’s classic as a ‘semi-sacred’ text, exemplifying the kind of change that took place between June and October 1962, when, he says, Britain was ‘on the cusp of the “real” 1960s’.

Whether a snapshot of this brief period can bear out such an ambitious thesis is a moot point. Can one really see the dawn of a new era in the Beatles’ first hit, ‘Love Me Do’, the initial James Bond film, Dr No, the launch of global television

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

RLF - March

Follow Literary Review on Twitter