A wonderful book, a masterpiece. It greatly recaptures the romance of the World's Fair, that bastion of optimism valiantly standing up against the depression and looming war. It's part history of the great figures and exhibits of the fair and part oral history telling the story of one frequent visitor. This is a beautifully written and informative book. ( )

Half fiction, half nonfiction, 1939 is a masterpiece of living history. Readers see the 1939 World's Fair through the eyes of Laura Glassman, a young woman touring with her beau. The first person sections provide a nice counterpoint to the big issues that Gelernter returns to throughout the book. He sees the '30s as profoundly optimistic, and it is hard to read this book and not be affected by the intense hope for the future. ( )

A snap shot of the NY worlds fair and U.S. history in 1939. Some times while reading it I kept thinking "It was the best of times it was the worst of times". The book is more sociology than history. It's a book I dicovered at a yard sail and was surprisingly pleased. ( )

1939 is a curious hybrid of fact and fiction in which the author, David Gelernter, uses a time-honored literary device -- a character's personal diary -- as a means of exploring the famous New York World's Fair of 1939 and, more generally, the culture of that time.

The '39 World's Fair is considered a sort of watershed event in the cultural history of the United States. Falling between the worst years of the Depression and America's entry into World War II, the Fair was a showcase for new and experimental technologies, designs, and products (among other things, the Fair was the first place where many Americans saw an amazing new gadget called television). More importantly, though, it was an expression of optimism in the face of darkness. At a time when the world teetered on the brink of utter despair, the Fair predicted a bright future in which the problems of the current moment would have been solved and the children and grandchildren of the Fair generation would live in peace. In that respect, the appeal of the Fair was very much like that of a certain type of science fiction, particularly of Star Trek, which came along at a similarly dark time and carried a similarly encouraging message.

Gelernter develops a number of themes as he leads us on a tour of the Fair, all of them connected, in some fashion, to the differences he perceives between the American culture of what he calls the "high Thirties" and our current era (or at least the era of the mid-90s, when this book was published). In short, he believes the people of 1939 were motivated more by what they felt they ought to do than what they wanted to do, an attitude that largely vanished during the tumult of the 1960s and '70s. Running hand in hand with that lost attitude (Gelernter says) was a respect for and deference to authority that seems utterly alien to our modern perspective. He doesn't mean power, necessarily, although that's definitely a companion to authority; rather, the people of 1939 accepted that some individuals were experts on certain subjects and that they were to be believed, and that there were rules which should be followed for the benefit of all. He stresses that people of this time weren't naive; they simply operated from a different set of expectations.

Lastly, Gelernter thinks the generation that saw the Fair was more optimistic than we are today. He sees in the fair a culture that believed in the future -- in a future -- and that this future would be a vast improvement over the present. He ponders at length why we no longer seem to have the same faith that progress is invariably good and that tomorrow will inevitably be better than today, and his conclusion is intriguing: basically, he says, we are living in the future that the Fair promised. Our world is one of suburbs and superhighways, personal automobiles and household gadgets that do our work for us, a world of advanced medicine, rapid transportation, and instantaneous communication, all exactly what the Fair promised the weary visitors of 1939. And if we find this present lacking, Gelernter suggests, it isn't so much because there turned out to be clouds in the silver lining -- although there most definitely are -- as it is that we have arrived at the destination our grandparents and parents imagined and we just don't know where to go next.

As provocative as these ideas are, however, 1939 was disappointing overall, a failure as both a history and a novel. The non-fiction portions of the book are meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness, and frequently held hostage to Gelernter's tendency to climb up on his soap box. (He's unabashed about his belief that high-Thirties culture was superior to our own; while I don't disagree with the general line of his arguments, the book sometimes feels like you're trapped in a car with Grampa Simpson as he yammers on about how much better it was in his day. The funny thing is that Gelernter isn't that old; I think I read somewhere that he was only in his forties when he wrote this book.) Meanwhile, the fictional narrative in 1939 -- which consists of a young woman's day at the Fair with the man who will become her fiance, and a few notes on what happens to them later -- is banal and uninvolving. The characters never came to life for me, and they're prone to the same kinds of talky digressions that Gelernter himself is during the non-fiction parts.

In the end, although the book provided me with a number of interesting quotes and plenty of food for thought, I really can't recommend it. If you're interested in this subject, E.L. Doctorow's novel World's Fair is a much better fictional treatment of the Fair; I still haven't found a good popular history volume about it. ( )

Half-read. So far, Gelernter is insufferable. It might improve in later chapters, and I'm interested enough in the subject matter to perservere. I think. ( )