"There was something so extraordinary about 1979, with its cascade of events from the ayatollah in Tehran to the fake messiah in Mecca, from massacres in Aleppo to executions in Islamabad, that to some it felt as if the sky were falling to earth. Bizarrely, in a way, it did. That summer marked the demise of NASA’s Skylab space station, in orbit since 1973. On the afternoon on July 12, the 77-ton station crashed through the atmosphere, disintegrating in a blaze of fireworks and scattering its debris over the remote Australian desert. Meanwhile, on earth, whole systems of thought were being altered: in the UK, in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, became the first woman to serve as prime minister. In China, Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his rule and opening up Communist China. They introduced a market revolution on opposite sides of the planet. In the United States, Republican Ronald Reagan would become president in 1981, ushering in a decade of social conservatism in the United States and marking the end of America’s own era of leftist revolutionary fervor. Big events, like the Zia coup and the Bhutto hanging, obscured the smaller ways in which life was being transformed. Over time, imperceptibly, people’s memories of their own culture and history would be altered. Looking back, they would struggle to pinpoint the exact moment when everything had changed."