| Title | : | 1968: The Year That Rocked the World |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0345455827 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780345455826 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 480 |
| Publication | : | First published December 30, 2003 |
To some, 1968 was the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap; avant-garde theater; the upsurge of the women's movement; and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.
In this monumental book, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that pivotal year, when television's influence on global events first became apparent, and spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the world. Encompassing the diverse realms of youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media, 1968 shows how twelve volatile months transformed who we were as a people–and led us to where we are today.
1968: The Year That Rocked the World Reviews
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The year 1968 was memorable for me personally. Coincidentally it was a remarkable year for the rest of the world as well. I was attracted to this book by the anticipation that it would provide a time capsule of an era when the baby boomer generation was young and crazy. It's sobering to realize that we are nearing the 50th anniversary of that fateful year.
In January of 1968 I graduated from college with my BS engineering degree which awarded me the necessary credentials to land a job qualifying me to receive an occupational deferment from the military draft. Also, on February 2, 1968 due to a string of unlikely coincidences I met the woman who five years eight months later became my wife. Thus 1968 was for me the beginning of both my professional life and the relationship that evolved into my marital life.
The "draft" was front and center at that time for young men my age because, depending on one's lottery number, they were being sent to the Vietnam War. My occupational deferment needed to be renewed annually, and there was no assurance that it would be renewed. Thus it was an ominous threat haunting future plans.
Of course this book did not address my personal situation described above. It is focused on happenings such as the
Tet offensive, the
My Lai massacre, the assassinations of
Martin Luther King Jr. and
Robert Kennedy, the
1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the
Prague Spring, and the
1968 Summer Olympics with its notorious
black power salute.
In 1968 it seemed as if every country in the world was having riots in the street. Regarding student demonstrations, Kurlansky didn't overdo
Berkeley and
Columbia at the expense of
Paris,
Warsaw or
Mexico City. It was a time when all students felt that if they didn't protest something they would be missing out of doing the "in thing." Even students in high schools prepared their own "underground newspapers."
The gains and costs of the new ethic of mass demonstration are neatly illustrated by the U.S. presidential campaign. The antiwar demonstrations helped force the effective abdication of President Lyndon Johnson—which resulted in the election of the "silent majority" spokesman Richard Nixon.
Without shortchanging the roles of race and age, Kurlansky highlights the rise of television as a near-instantaneous conduit of news. There's a chapter on the rise of
second wave feminism providing a compact but thorough review of that subject. The music scene—shift to psychedelic rock—and the drug scene—marijuana and LSD—are also recounted. In order to provide background and context to these various issues the book includes discussion of happenings in preceding and subsequent years, thus providing a fairly complete post-war history. -
Although only a junior in high school, 1968 was the most important year of my life to date, the year when I was most conscious of and involved in what was going on in the broader world. When I find a book on the subject, or the period surrounding it, or of a major event occurring during it, I tend to pick it up. Of all such books read thus far, Kurlansky's is the best.
The reasons for this opinion are several. For one thing, he doesn't confine himself to the USA. Extensive coverage is provided for events elsewhere, most particularly Czechoslovakia. Consequently, I actually learned some things I hadn't known. Also, he actually interviewed major participants in the events described--and not just Americans. I also appreciated the fact that he is openly partisan. I didn't share his enthusiasm for RFK or his mystification by McCarthy, but I certainly understand where he's coming from and appreciatively recognize his insider's point of view for some of the events discussed. Even when I feel his disagreement with some of my opinions, I feel that they've been respected. Often I was moved nearly to tears by his retellings.
There are some minor errors of fact in the book. The ones I noticed were primarily those concerning events I participated in--most particularly the demonstrations connected to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. However, the overall picture of the period as we lived it is, as we used to say, "right on". -
Onvan : 1968: The Year That Rocked the World - Nevisande : Mark Kurlansky - ISBN : 345455827 - ISBN13 : 9780345455826 - Dar 480 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2001
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4-5 for content. 3 for delivery. Interesting, if cumbersome work. Classic Kurlansky. Some parts were great, others pedantic. Worth it if you have the time and interest. NB-I listened to this book- don't do it. The private English school grad who reads the nearly ruined the read for me, particularly his butchering of French and Spanish. I was painfully reminded of one of my favorite author's P.G. Wodehouse, starting line of The Luck of the Bodkins : “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
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I listened to this book in the audible version six years after first reading it. I had forgotten from my first reading that much of this book is about events In other parts of the world in addition to the US. We spend a lot of time in Poland and Czechoslovakia and France. Sometime in Mexico and Canada. The focus in many countries is on demonstrations by students. Because I was also following along in the e-book, I have added many excerpts from the book.
I was strangely detached from many of the events of 1968. I was focused on Vietnam but was a married full-time college student With a small child and a practically full time job. I was pretty distracted by a daily life that was pretty demanding.
I am a sucker for books about the 60s and 70s so I had no way to ignore
1968: The Year that Rocked the World once I heard about it. It is another of those one dollar online used books. I can blame Goodreads for bringing it to my attention. Otherwise I might have died never having read this small jewel. It is special because it covers the 1968 political and social stirrings not only in the U.S. but internationally. It was a rebellious year in places other than the U.S. If you lived through this era, you will find much familiar but probably a few things that will be new to you. It does stray occasionally outside the immediate neighborhood of 1968 but almost always with some connection to our banner year.
You will thrill to on the spot coverage of the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago:On Saturday night the demonstrators seemed particularly reluctant to leave Lincoln Park and chanted, “Revolution now!” and, “The park belongs to the people!” The police amassed their troops, and just as they seemed ready to attack, Allen Ginsberg mystically appeared and lead the demonstrators out of the park, loudly humming a single note: “Om.”
…
Sunday night the police started forcibly to clear Lincoln Park at 9:00. Abby Hoffman went up to them and in a mock scolding tone of voice, “Can’t you wait two hours? Where the hell’s the law and order in this town?” The police actually backed off until their posted 11:00 curfew.
But then the book covered the real police clubbing as well.
World events of 1968 are covered thoroughly as the title of the book promised: The Year that Rocked the World. We are taken to Poland, Paris, Prague and more. And although the book has some humor thanks to the Yippies, 1968 was a year of uprisings often led by students both here and around the world.
The government was violent. The police were violent. The times were violent and revolution was so close.
Radicals made the Bob Dylan line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” into the name of a group of bomb makers.
1968: The Year that Rocked the World captures the tenor of those times and distills it into 383 pages of remembrance and reflection. What were you doing in 1968?
In History it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.
…
The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia. Despite the thousands dead in Vietnam, the million starved in Biafra, the crushing of idealism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the massacre in Mexico, the clubbing and brutalization of dissenters all over the world, the murder of the two Americans who most offered the world hope, to many it was a year of great possibilities and it is missed. As Camus wrote in The Rebel, those who long for peaceful times are longing for “not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.” The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced. There were too many of them, and if they were given no other opportunity, they would stand in the street and shout about them. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense of where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.
I give 1968 four stars for that effort to give us hope again. -
1968: The Year That Rocked the World is a political book so if you are looking for a year-in-review type of thing, you won't find it here. It's not full of movie stars although it mentions some famous movies, and it doesn't talk about fashion or artists or music, although it gives mention to all three. No, this is all about the startling political events of 1968. Not just those in the USA either but the ones all over the world. 1968 was that kind of year. The author even starts out by stating his prejudices and belief that objectivity on the subject of 1968 would be dishonest. I agree. 1968 was that kind of a year also. I was in college, it was the year I turned twenty-one and it was also the year of my marriage. I was not a protester though I was deeply against the war in Vietnam, but protesting came later to the deep South. My views of that year were shaped for the long term by what all of us witnessed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Those are images that will probably never go away for anyone who saw them.
This book is a well done presentation of the state of the whole world in that year and a good way to get quickly acquainted with the major issues of that time around the globe and the unique way they played out in the sixties whether it was in the USA, Europe, or the Communist countries of the Eastern Bloc. All over large groups of students had a desire to change the way things had been to a new way of doing things. The same baby boom had occurred everywhere to some degree so there were lots of young people all seemingly driven by the same desires and fueled by music, sometimes drug use, and, always, impatience.
Were they successful? On the whole, I'd have to say no but they did set in motion changes that eventually came about in many different areas. The story of 1968 is one worth reading. Of how it came to be, what the forces were that brought it to be and why it was so unique make a compelling story. -
How much we forget. 1968 was a monumental year in many ways. I got married that year. There was a police riot at the Democratic National convention. Two assassinations. Riots in cities. A spirit of rebellion against authority all around the world. The Vietnam War got worse with the Tet Offensive. The president decided not to run for reelection. The capture of the Pueblo by North Korea. Prague Spring followed by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. And the election of Nixon. Many people were sure it was the end not just of the United States, but of civilization as well.
Media attention was essential for the non-violent movements to succeed. Something they learned quickly was that in order to get that attention, non-violence had to be met with violence. If the response was equally non-violent, the media would yawn and go elsewhere. Martin Luther King learned this from the police chief of Albany, GA, Laurie Pritchett, who thwarted the "Albany Movement" in 1961-62 by responding to King's demonstration in a completely non-violent manner. It completely undercut the movement there. They were forced to target cities with hot-headed police chiefs and mayors. Video of police beating up peaceful demonstrators was priceless. It's a lesson that police in many communities still have not learned.
1968 was the beginning of a new era in television. Videotape immediacy and satellite transmission meant that the war could now be seen almost live from the battleground. The Tet Offensive, a military defeat for the Viet Cong (they were never to mount a cohesive campaign again) was a media victory for them. Westmoreland's staff had been talking about a light at the end of the tunnel, but the public now realized it was an oncoming train. The police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago were broadcast live. That had never happened before. People could see Mayor Daley call Abraham Ribicoff a Jew motherfucker on the convention floor. Those in power didn't like that unedited version of reality. Hubert Humphrey announced that "when" he became president he would have the FCC "look into that." The great liberal as authoritarian. Then again, the violence against the Hippies probably helped Nixon win the election.
Abbie Hoffman understood the power of television. Many people thought he was just a clown, but he understood that clowns attracted attention and that brought TV. TV didn't just report the news any more, it shaped it, and Hoffman, older than most of the other radicals at the time understood its importance.
In the meantime, a perfect metaphor for the bifurcation of society happened in the White House when Lady Bird Johnson invited Eartha Kitt, born in the cotton fields of South Carolina, to a dinner attended mostly by rich white liberal women. Topic of the day was how to address the crime wave (translation: blacks out of control in the cities.) She took it upon herself to suggest that having predominantly black army you sent to fight a war they didn't believe in might be part of the problem. After an uncomfortable silence, Lady Bird graciously suggested she wasn't able to see the world the same way not having had the same experience as Kitt. There it was in a nutshell. *
2020 looks like a walk in the park in comparison.
Slogans are always useful in helping to garner support and defining an issue. The Democrats have failed rather miserably in picking slogans recently, "Defund the Police" being an excellent example. You should not have to explain a slogan. The civil rights movement picked cogent ones. "Freedom Riders" has such an appealing ring to it and needs no explanation. The non-violent movement had the moral high ground and the example of the protester who took his shoes off before leaping on top of a police car to give a speech because he didn't want to scratch the car was emblematic. Running a non-violent movement takes so much more work and planning than just being violent and reacting with rage.
Anyone over fifty will be riveted. Those under should read it to understand why we are where we are today. A must read.
*Kitt's comment: "The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don't have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons – and I know what it's like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson – we raise children and send them to war." As a result the CIA put together a phony dossier on Kitt, that was later unearthed by Seymour Hersh in 1975, that branded her as a "sadistic nymphomaniac" and got her blacklisted. (
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/03/ar...) -
A very good distillation of the social feeling, collective consciousness of youth and subsequent political events of the time, as the post-war generation begins to come of age.
It goes into the details of events surrounding the Tet Offensive, the Prague Spring and the later failed invasion of Prague by the Soviets that lead to the downfall of communism in East Europe. It covers the boredom and frustration in France that lead to the 22 March Movement that would culminate in the student protests of May 1968 in Paris, the Biafran war, the Mexican student revolt and the dawn of the feminist movement.
It covers mostly the thinking, actions, theories of intellectual groups, i.e. frustrated students not liking what their leadership is deciding on their behalf, whether that was France and the 22 Mars Movement lead by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany le rouge) or America and the anti-Vietnam movement.Four factors merged to create 1968:
- the example of the civil rights movement, which at the time was so new and original;
- a generation that felt so different and alienated that it rejected all forms of authority;
- a war that was so hated so universally around the world that it provided a cause for all the rebels seeking one;
- and all of this occurring at the moment television was coming of age but was still new enough not to have yet become controlled, distilled, and packaged the way it is today.
The protest of students surprised many in power, they were an unexpected source of revolution, (more used to workers strikes) that caught politicians and leaders by surprise, not realising the revolutionary feeling rising from within, from their own children/grandchildren.
France might never have had a 1968 had it not been for an overzealous government. Looking back Cohn-Bendit said:"If the government had not thought they had to crush the movement, we never would have reached this point of a fight for liberation. There would have been a few demonstrations and that would have been it."
The French government had thought of arresting him, but according to legend, de Gaulle rejected the idea, saying, "One doesn't arrest Voltaire."This generation, with its distrust of authority and understanding of television, and raised in the finest school of political activism, the American civil rights movement, was uniquely suited to disrupt the world. And then they were offered a war they did not want to fight and did not think should be fought... The young people of the generation, the ones who were in college in 1968, were the draftees. These younger member of the sixties generation, the people of 1968, had a fury in them that had not seen before.
Everyone had an opinion on the generation gap and much of what was said contributed to inciting rebellion. One of de Gaulle's men André Malaraux, denied there was a gap, insisting the problem was the normal struggle of youth to grow up, while a supreme court justice Earl Warren referred to it as a need to resolve tensions between 'the daring of youth' and the 'the mellow practicality' of the more mature.
The protests in Paris drew in more and more protestors, Cohn-Bendit was as surprised as the police by the students, but was unable to control it. "Violent revolution is in the French culture," he said (as a mature man in reflection on these earlier times). "We tried to avoid an escalation. I thought the violence as a dynamic was destroying the movement. The message was getting lost in the violence as it always does."It was a tonic for a population that had grown bored. Today photographs and film footage available from that time are of violence. To the average French participants however, it wasn't about violence at all, and that is not what they most remember. It was about a pastime for which the French have a rare passion: talking.
Ultimately it resulted in reform not revolution, revolutions are said to form slowly as they build their base and ideology, the students hadn't garnered the support of workers or the wider population, however there was an explosion against a suffocatingly stagnant society.The real sense of 1968 was a tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, of people talking, talking on the street, in the universities, in the theatres. A whole suystem of order and authority and tradition was swept aside. Much of the freedom today began in '68.
Cohn-Bendit was deported and it was ten years before he was allowed back in.A rejection of materialism and a distaste for corporate culture were dismissed as not wanting to work. A persistent claim of a lack of hygiene was used to dismiss a different way of dressing, whereas neither beatniks nor hippies were particularly dirty.
Who were they reading?Perhaps the single most influential writer for young people in the sixties was Algerian born French Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus...In the 1960's students all over the world read
The Plague and interpreted it as a call to activism.A Martinique-born psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon became an international figure after he wrote a book in 1961 called Les damnés de la terre. Translated into 25 languages, the book was read by U.S. college students under the title,
The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon too had been in Algeria, opposing French policy, becoming a leader in the fight for Algerian independence. His book examined the the psychology not only of colonialism but of overthrowing colonialism and the kind of new man required to build a postcolonial society.The American activists wanted a stop to the aggression. The Europeans wanted a defeat of colonialism - they wanted the US to be crushed just as the European colonial powers had been.
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan became the most read books of the 1960's after the author was asked to conduct a survey of her classmates, fellow graduates of Smith College, which inspired to write a book about a series of false beliefs she labelled the feminine mystique - that women and men were very different and that it was masculine to want a career and feminine to find happiness in being dominated by a husband and his career and to be busy raising children.
Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex was equally popular, a condemnation of marriage and critique of woman's role in society. It was said that before Friedan, de Beauvoir and others like them, a woman did not have the vocabulary (or perhaps too a publisher) to articulate her feelings of justice.
Poetry was important and seemed to matter to people, there was even telephone service in New York City in 1968 that offered a "dial a poem" service. Allen Ginsberg is mentioned, Robert Lowell, Rod McKuen was the bestselling poet of 68, but the one who I found most intriguing and isn't mentioned in the book was Diane di Prima and her
Revolutionary Letters.
I'll be looking elsewhere to learn more about the attraction of communal living and the 'love' side of this era, and the woman's perspective, as 1968 was a trigger point for the launch of a new wave of feminism and while extensive, this is by it's nature a very masculine reporting and perception of that era.
It feels ironic to read this on 17 March 2020 in France, where at midday we go into a 15 day era of total confinement, unable to leave our homes without an 'attestation de déplacement', not because of revolution but due to a viral pandemic.The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of the population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced....And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is a wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.
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I have always been interested in the year 1968 and this book did not disappoint. This was a history written about all parts and countries on this earth where protest was.
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Here's a truism for you: Americans love to talk about themselves. One look in the American History section of even a Canadian bookseller will show you how much (to name but one place to find such talk). There is a wealth of US History, from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to the World Wars to the Vietnam War to the Gulf Wars to the "War on Terror" to every other interesting thing that has come out of the USA on those shelves, so when there is a dearth of written history surrounding some topic of American interest, the silence is noticeable.
The radical side of the '60s is just such a case (as is the Korean War, but I will save that for another day). What little there is written about the Radical Sixties, and there is very little in comparison with all other US History topics, comes mostly from the '60s themselves, and mostly from writers who were there, who were agitating, who were putting their bodies and reputations on the line. And of those books the bulk are by and about the Black Panther Party (which is fantastic, and I highly recommend that avenue of study to you if you haven't followed that avenue before).
Hence, whenever a book appears on my radar talking about the Radical Sixties -- with Nam as a backdrop to and motivation for radicalism rather than being presented as the single most important event of an American generation -- I pounce.
Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year that Rocked the World is such a book, focusing on the epicentric year in not just US radicalism but world radicalism, and it found me in the perfect mood to be reminded of how and why we fight the status quo.
Not that Kurlansky is 100% dedicated to such an endeavour. No, there are times when Kurlansky's journalistic voice -- for this is much more a piece of excellent journalism as opposed to a critical / academic history of the period -- interjects, expressing a preference for slow (read "civilized") change over radical protest. I suspect Kurlansky does think the status quo needs changing, but slow change without upheaval. Yet, and to his great credit, Kurlansky doesn't allow his partiality for more peaceful practices to cloud his judgment of the radicals he's writing about.
Tom Hayden, Angela Y. Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Muhammad Ali, Alexander Dubček, Bobby Kennedy, Betty Friedan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Mark Rudd (all radicals in their own ways) and countless others get a fair assessment from Kurlansky's reportage, and only the slightest of Yankee-patriot (chauvanistic) bias slips in when the radical in question happens to be Czech or German or French or Mexican.
What 1968 does and does best is to report on the year itself. From January to December, from Pope Paul VI declaring January 1st, 1968 a day of peace to Apollo 8 orbiting the moon and sending us the first pictures of humanty's first Earth Rise, Kurlansky catches us up on all the upheaval, all the anger, all the striving, all the failures, all the moments that would and do resonate right up until today. Well ... maybe not "all." More like "most of." Kurlansky does tend to gloss over some events and offer others in deep detail. He loves Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring, he has a thing for the student uprisings at Columbia University, and he dutifully gives us the happenings in and around the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but there are happenings around the world and in the US that only get passing mention. Really, he had enough to work with to produce a 1,200 page tome rather than this well written, eminently readable 383 page primer on 1968, but he was going for something more intimate and personal, something that spoke to him and that he hoped would speak to his readers. In that ... he succeeded.
Moreover, I found a number of people and places and events to explore more deeply in 1968, and I enjoyed being reminded of things I'd forgotten -- I even loved the little snippets from around the world that helped to remind the readers that there is always something important going on somewhere, even if it isn't your own backyard. But I leave 1968 wishing it had been even more than it was, hungering for more about the Radical Sixties, wishing there was a way to rekindle that spirit in the same way again, despite the internet and all the ways those in power have learned to derail our radicalism.
Who knows? Wherever Kurlansky's 1968 leads me next may be exactly what I was looking for all along, then I can credit Mark Kurlansky for doing what I had hoped he would do in the pages of his own book. And if that doesn't happen ... 1968 is still well worth the time. What a fucking year. -
This was the first of three books I read in 2018 that chronicle the year 1968, often referred to as one of the single most tumultuous years in American history:
1968: The Year That Rocked the World - Mark Kurlansky
The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America - Jules Witcover
1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture & the Shaping of a Generation - Charles Kaiser
Of the three, I really looked forward to The Year the Dream Died. Its author, Jules Witcover, was a veteran newspaper reporter who covered the 1968 presidential campaign.
I am fascinated by the year as a crucible year in American history. On the first day of 1968, I was 2 years, 2 months, and one day old, so I have no memory of that year. All of what I know of that year is entirely what I've experienced secondhand--on TV, in history books, magazines, and other media.
When I was in my twenties, none of above books existed. There were no long-form studies of the year as a window to understanding the 1960s. Seeing a void I wanted to fill, I decided I wanted to write a book about the year. But after some initial outlining and research, I knew I didn't have the pedigree to write the book, and that it was best left to a more experienced writer who actually reported during the era. (That's why I was especially interested in Witcover's book.)
I began with the Kurlansky book because he's a bestselling author who wrote a noteworthy book about the history of salt (Salt: A World History).
Having read 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, I can say that the title is ostensibly true, albeit ambiguous. 1968 did rock the world--but the title suggests a more expansive book than it really is.
Early on, Kurlansky mentions that the year is interesting because of the rise of protests, especially on college campuses. As the book progresses, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that protest is the book's overarching theme--as a result, there's a huge amount of history of the year that Kurlansky avoids. To wit: two of the central figures of the year, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, barely make appearances; and the Tet offensive, arguably the pivotal moment of the entire Vietnam war, is only glanced at.
Instead, we get a lot of background into the modern histories of Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, and Mexico. Did I really need a backgrounder into Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to set up the 1968 Mexico City Olympics? No. Did I really need to find out why Charles de Gaulle ascended again to power in France in the late 1950s in order to understand the student protests in Paris in 1968? Not really. That's all beside the point.
Nevertheless, the backgrounders do work well for Kurlansky at times. To understand the rise of student protests in the United States in 1968, he drops back to the 1950s and explains the rise of the New Left, which was the engine behind the American protest movement. That was well presented. I gained a renewed understanding of why late 1960s protest began, grew, and matured, and it's one of my favorite parts of the book.
Also worth noting is how television grew in importance in the 1960s, and especially how satellite communication dramatically shrank the daily news cycle. Instead of waiting at least a day for news from Vietnam, for example, American nightly news broadcasts began showing what happened that same day. And for the first time, American viewers could see live, as-it-happened video from a flashpoint of news--protesters getting savagely beaten by the Chicago police outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention--so now when I hear the protesters' clarion call, 'The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!' I know better what that meant.
Kurlansky's decision to turn his attention to non-American stories is not entirely disappointing. It's easy to get lost in the American version of 1968--I'm certainly guilty of that, as well. So his effort to shine lights in European venues is acceptable, even if it is only a very small part of the grand stage on which the events of 1968 unfolded.
But again, there's the issue of the title not quite explaining the book. While it would have been more accurate for the publisher to title the book something like 1968: The Year of Protest, it's not exactly a marketable title. What the more ambiguous title did, ultimately, is make me an enthusiastic reader to begin with, but an underwhelmed and slightly disappointed reader at the end, lamenting my expectations at a book that is smaller than it should be. -
Several years ago I read Rick Perlstein's well-researched but very depressing "Nixonland" while working for the UN in the Republic of Georgia, and from that read I'd already gathered that the U.S. had some very ugly ethical, political, and geopolitical truths to tackle in 1968. I have also heard that we are always nostalgic for the years both we and our parents were on the cusp of adulthood, and my father graduated high school in 1968--so of course I picked up this book. In it, Kurlansky takes the reader on a trip around the world in that year to demonstrate that '68 was a time of great change, sparked by young people (usually students) and the advent of television to broadcast the aforementioned ugly truths worldwide almost immediately. Angry crowds were squaring off against riot police not only in Chicago (this book certainly supports Perlstein's narrative on Mayor Daley's behavior at the Democratic Convention), but Warsaw, Mexico City, Paris, and Prague. Along the way, "1968" takes the reader into some very interesting places, with revelations like "In 1968 Julius Lester published his seminal work, 'Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!'" and some provocative accounts of Charles deGaulle's actions under pressure. I didn't know that Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy wrote poetry, that a Swedish count was dodging anti-aircraft fire to deliver humanitarian assistance to austere runways in Biafra, or the significance of Nelson Rockefeller's campaign for the Republican Party's future. I don't agree with all Kurlansky's conclusions. His argument that what happened in Czechoslovakia represented the beginning of the end for the USSR certainly provokes some thought, however. (Full disclosure--I read this book during a visit to Prague, and that city's cobblestones will never look the same to me again.) "Antiwar activists," he writes, "did not end American hegemonic warfare but only changed the way it was pursued and how it was sold to the public. In opposing the draft, the antiwar activists showed the generals what they had to do to continue waging war." His language is hyperbolic, but the journey from Walter Cronkite taking off his glasses to Nixon's favorite media consultant running a certain modern and definitely not objective news channel is worth our attention; and the U.S. military HAS been extremely effective as an all-volunteer force. Kurlansky tells us in his Introduction point-blank that as he was 20 years old while all this was going on so he's biased, that "fairness is possible but true objectivity is not," so readers who dig history and political science have to consider that as they turn every page of this book. Again, I don't agree with all his perspectives, but I did enjoy delving into the events that shaped who we are and how we developed since this incredible year.
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One good thing about this book is that it has about 450 fewer dreadfully boring pages dedicated to the subject of salt than the last book by Kurlansky that I read.
I seem to like books about specific years: 1117 BC, 1066, 1215, 1776, 1927, I liked them all. So when I came across 1968 I thought, here’s a book for me. But then I saw the author’s name and hesitated. Wasn’t this the guy who wrote that inexplicably critically acclaimed and appallingly unreadable book about salt?
But it turns out that 1968 is a much more interesting subject than salt, and when he’s writing about protests, riots, war, and assassination, instead of the different kinds of sauerkraut and preserved fish that can be made from salt, Kurlansky is capable of keeping things interesting. I think he may be a bit guilty of romanticizing the student movements, but he relates the story of 1968 with enough verve that he gets away with it. I found myself swept away by the events of 1968 as described by Kurlansky. -
Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year That Rocked the World is an excellent global account of that memorable annus horribilis, focused especially on student protest movements in US, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico. The book ranges widely, but doesn't sprawl out of control. The material is consistently interesting, the writing sharp. "Year histories", like "city biographies", is a genre full of potential. Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed is another good one.
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1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD
Mark Kurlansky
WOW, this was everything that I thought it would be. Despite being only 11/12 in 1968, it was a memorable year for me. My sister and cousin graduated from high school, I changed age groups in horse shows, and every time I saw in front of the TV there was someone killed in the civil rights movement. I was unaware of so many of the things that didn't stick out to a child of that age.
I have always been aware of this year and the importance it played in changing the world because, before it, I could have been a nurse, a kindergarten teacher, a telephone operator, or some similar job, but after, the world was open. If you weren't alive then, it was a major turning point in this country, and knowing the history is important.
I found the book riveting and devoured EVERY page. But I was and still am a history nerd, so perhaps that influences me. But I don't think so.
5 stars
Happy Reading! -
An engaging and comprehensive (political) history, but the sheer scope necessitates a sacrifice of nuance. To provide one example, Kurlansky’s account of the Clean-Ins suggests uncomplicated cooperation between the Diggers and the Yippies, et al, when most Digger literature—including Emmett Grogan’s autobiography—attest that this was not the case at all. (Grogan’s feelings toward Abbie Hoffman and his media circus mostly seesawed between exasperation and contempt.) Perhaps a minor oversight in the greater scheme of things, but nonetheless misleading and makes me wonder what other details may have slipped through the cracks.
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Mark Kurlansky's book does a masterful job of recounting the momentous social, cultural, and political events of 1968. In 1968 I was a 19-year-old American college student, fairly liberal but not radical (RFK supporter, anti-war, non-violent demonstrator). Reading the book reactivated memories that had been dormant for almost 50 years. The worldwide scope of the book also broadened my knowledge and understanding of the era beyond what had been more immediately familiar to me at the time.
I'm confident that readers who were "of age" in 1968 will appreciate the book for similar reasons, and I highly recommend it to them. I think that readers to whom 1968 is just "ancient history" will also enjoy and learn from the book. 1968 was truly an eventful, consequential year, with repercussions that are still being felt today. -
This book brought back a lot of memories of my youth.(I turned nineteen in 1968.) The author does a good job providing a digest of many of the events of that year, but at the beginning of the book the author offers the proposition that this is such an important year that it changed the world. While I do not question that many of the events that occurred that year, did much to alter history, the author fails to, in any great detail, address what he believes are the results of this seminal year.
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Whew! It took me nearly two months, but I finished it! Was it worth the time? Yes.
I was a child in 1968, and I have a terrible time separating out what I actually remember and what it feels like I remember because I've heard so much about it from those older than I am. I also have a hard time putting early events in time order sometimes. Reading this book did help me do some of that filtering and sorting. I have pretty clear memories the two assassinations, of the curfews in our town because of riots, watching coverage off the space program events with Uncle Walter, and my brother and his friends in military uniform. I think I remember seeing the coverage of Chicago gone mad during the DNC that year, but I can't be sure I didn't pick that up from documentaries later. Note those things are all either US-centric or personal. What was going on in the rest of the world...well, I'm not sure how solid a concept I had of "the rest of the world" at that age. And I have to say that my public school education didn't cover 99% of what's in this book.
Kurlansky's approach is largely chronological, although he does have to skip around a bit as events get intertwined. France, Canada, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Middle East, Latin America, Nigeria and other hot spots on the African Continent -- each had major events happen in 1968, and the effects had ripples for years afterward.
It's dense material, and I was glad to have read the Cronkite biography (another hefty tome) before this as it served as a lead-in as well as an alternate POV on some of the events.
It's kind of amazing really. You'd think in over 50 years, we'd have made a lot more progress in the world. -
This is one of the most readable and entertaining history books I have read. Kurlansky assumes little prior knowledge on the part of the reader - he narrates the origins of the Vietnam War, the formation of NATO and Warsaw Pact and the foundations of the cold war, history of the early decades of the century in Mexico etc - sometimes perhaps to the bemusement to the regular history reader. What Kurlansky manages to pull off is extremely rare: pushing the reader to the times so that he can feel and touch the events; sit in the protest arena-turned Columbia University, simply talk in the streets of Paris, and read news with excitement in Prague. He reveals both the euphoria and the tragedy of the eventful year. What was inspiring and what was disappointing? Kurlansky has also has a flair for making particular characters wild and fascinating - I cannot describe how many videos of Allen Ginsberg I went on to see while and after reading the book. Also, Kurlansky clearly takes sides. He loves the protesters, yippies, hippies, black power activists, and feminists. One can't help get kicks as he uses Nixon and to a lesser extent, Reagan as punching bags. One has to get kicks reading the book. One has to read the book.
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Disproportionately skewed towards US events. I mean allocating 5-6 pages to Nigerian Civil War&Biafra while devoting more than a hundred to American students' protests? Give me a brake and re-write the coverage of the Soviet invasion to Czechoslavakia. Your account is very shallow.
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1968 AND ALL THAT
Mark Kurlansky has set himself the task of writing the history of 1968, a year of rock n roll n rebellions. Much of the focus of the book is on the student movements that erupted across the world, principally in France, the United States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico and Germany, though Kurlansky still finds room to deal with the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in Biafra, as well as topics such as feminism, and the popular philosophy and literature of the era.
Kurlansky writes in a crisp readable prose, the sections that cover the student movements in the various countries appear to have been covered in a reasonably impartial and thorough manner, though the focus on student movements does seem to be a little overdone for a book that claims to be a history of the whole year. The perversity of this is quite clear when one considers that the actuality of the Vietnam War receives far less coverage than the anti-war movement in the United States and such coverage as there is gives little idea of the reality of that war. The troubles in Northern Ireland receive zero coverage, as does South Africa. Latin American, African, and Asian (the cultural revolution in China is graced with a few paragraphs) coverage is primarily focussed on a single country in each continent: Mexico, Biafra and Vietnam. And then there is the big problem I had with this book . . .
Ever seen the "The Big Lebowski"? In that brilliant film by the brothers Coen there is a character called Walter, the Big Lebowski's bowling buddy. No matter what the subject under discussion is, Walter manages to bring it back to the issue of `Nam. Kurlansky's `Nam is Zionism and Israel.
Firstly there appears to be a problem with emphasis, for example there are well over twenty mentions (often of multiple pages) in the index for Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Judaism. In way of comparison the total for Muslims, Islam and Arabs is zero. That problem of emphasis is a relatively minor one in comparison to the out-right lying and propaganda that serves for Kurlansky's coverage of the Middle East. For him Palestinians don't exist as a people, except as terrorists; anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are synonyms; Israel offered back the land it invaded and occupied in 1967 in return for peace; the Israeli government had nothing to do with the settlement of the occupied territories, etcetera, etc. And Kurlansky's source for all this wisdom? In the bibliography section we have one book covering the Middle East, Michael Oren's "Six Days of War". Who is Michael Oren? Currently he is Likud prime minister Netenyahu's man in Washington. The only other "scholar" mentioned is the intensely partisan Zionist Walter Laquer.
Without Kurlansky's nonsense on Israel and Zionism this would be a reasonable book on the Student movements of 1968; not a deep or profound book on that year, but rather on the level of a good television documentary series. With the nonsense, the book is a disgrace and certainly doesn't deserve the back page blurb from Uncut magazine ("combining the rigour of a historian"). To put it mildly, "1968: The year that rocked the world", was a disappointing read. -
I was in eighth grade when 1968 dawned, too immature and self-centered to fully appreciate the truly momentous, spirit-shattering and world-changing events—the effect of which is still felt 50 years later. And that is why I read this outstanding book by Mark Kurlansky. This is not an easy read; it is a history book, after all, and will demand your full attention. But it is so worth the effort and time because it offers perspective.
From Moscow to Mexico, Berkeley to Biafra and Prague to Poland, the year was remarkable because of multiple and varied cries for revolution—everywhere. Students protested in almost every first-world country, and in some cases lost their lives for their efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president. Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. More military members died in Vietnam in 1968 than any other year of that war. Chicago police went berserk at the Democratic National Convention, beating innocent citizens. Mexico massacred protesting students weeks before hosting the summer Olympics with the theme of brotherly love and friendship. It was a summer of Black Power and boycotts, burning draft cards and burning bras. And television changed it all, bringing these perilous events far and wide into the privacy of our living rooms.
This prodigiously researched history book recounts all the year's events, focusing especially on the citizen protests. It was these activities that more than anything else made people realize they were not powerless and—even more important—could not be ignored by the powerful.
"Remember 1968" should be a rallying cry for everyone who feels repressed in any day and age, and this book is the how-to instruction manual. -
Interesting book! I started high school (10th grade) in 1968 and by then was already swept up by the 60's wave of political rebellion and anti-war activities, along with my older sister. Was I a Young Socialist? Well, of course -- anything to freak out my Nixon-loving Republican parents. One act of rebellion was, to commemorate Martin Luther King's assassination, we passed out black arm bands at school -- an act that could have gotten us expelled. (Gee, now King has his own holiday. How things have changed.) And we also had our own underground newspaper called -- what else? -- "The Little Red Schoolhouse."
In college, in Mexico in 1972/73, my student friends there told me about the Tlatelolco massacre, which was still fresh in everyone's mind. All these years have passed and I never knew the details, not till I read this book. That chapter on Mexico was the most enlightening for me. And I've even been to that square, not realizing then that it was the location of the massacre: Tlatelolco, the Plaza of the Three Cultures. I also appreciated learning about Prague Spring.
The book was a good introduction to many events that I can now research and learn more about. -
This is not my normal read. I came upon it quite accidentally. But I must admit that I felt I learned more about what was happening during my graduation year. I knew it was a turbulent time. But I thought 18 was that way for all young adults throughout time.
Pulling out from the individual conflict I did know and felt personally the war versus peace and love but little did I know of what was happening world wide. This book takes the magnifying glass and zeros in on a conflict from the persons at point zero to the followers and then the global ramifications. The glass moves in and out through many points on the maps clarifying much of what has come since.
I am not one to understand history or political standings but I did feel I learned more about my life from the outside in.
The narrator, Christopher Cazenove kept me interested. Of course, his wonderful British accent added a sense of the well-educated mind. I don't think I would have been able to get through a book like this without him. -
This is a very good popular history for those of us who did not experience the sixties. I especially liked that the book took a global approach and was not simply focused on the U.S.
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It's hard to think of a more dramatic year than 1968 (though 2016 comes close): with rioting in the streets, the murders of two beloved figures, the turmoil in Vietnam and in the streets of Prague and Paris, and the mounting fervor of the conservative movement and its untelegenic candidate, 1968 was a watershed year for not just America but the world. Mark Kurlansky does a fantastic job conveying all the high drama of that year in "1968: The Year That Rocked the World."
I'd always been drawn to 1968 as a year worthy of study in no small part because of the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, but I'd rarely found myself thinking about all the other events of the year. Kurlansky's book is a good overview of a year that fundamentally changed so much of the world, sometimes for the worse but often for the better. Social protest movements spread across the world (and conservative heads of state suspected coordinated attacks, but they were usually spontaneous manifestations of an unease with the way that things had always been). From the summer Olympics in Mexico City to the loosening of restrictions in Communist Czechoslovakia, change was in the air. Not all the movements succeeded (if anything, the protests by Yippie radicals outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago mobilized a conservative backlash that helped put the degenerate Richard Nixon into the White House), but the impact of those movements is still felt today in Black Lives Matter protests and demands for equal rights for women and a greater accountability for those who have committed racial or sexual transgressions.
The year 1968 was also an election year, and for a brief moment Robert Kennedy seemed poised to save the soul of the country. But he was not alone; Martin Luther King Jr. was in many ways reduced to a figurehead in the Civil Rights movement, passed by in favor of younger, more militant leaders like Stokely Carmichael. But his assassination in April unleashed a howl of fury in much of the nation, and Kennedy's murder two months later would seemingly put out the calls for social justice that both men in their own ways espoused. But their legacies also include the young people that they inspired at that time, many of whom became leaders in their own right as the decades wore on. And the war in Vietnam began to lose its appeal not just among the young who would be likely to serve in it, but also among the youth of the world, seeing America as pursuing another colonialist policy akin to their European predecessors (and equally doomed to failure, as it turned out). The world rose up in different climes, and different times in the year, to demand that the war in Vietnam come to an end.
The Soviet Union crushed the flowers of the Prague Spring under tank tracks in August, ensuring that it would never be viewed as the savior of Eastern Europe ever again (and setting in motion its own collapse, albeit into a similar style of rule under another degenerate, Vladimir Putin). And the space program, at the end of this most chaotic year, offered a hint of perspective as an Apollo mission tasked with orbiting the moon sent back to the world the first pictures of our planet from a distance, so small and insignificant in the depths of space.
This was a fun read, a great collection of history-as-anecdotes that never failed to amuse, infuriate, or illuminate just what made 1968 so important in world history. -
A great book, providing a detailed history of one of the most important single years in the 20th century. The author, Mark Kurlansky, is most well known for food related books (Cod, Salt, Big Oyster), so I was surprised to see him as an author of this topic but was certainly impressed with his work. He was an admitted participant of 1968 and starts off by explaining how his holistic research of that year gave him a very different perspective than what he remembered. He puts 1968 on parallel with 1848 or the 1780s as a specific period of time which greatly changed the future for a wide swath of humanity. He covers not just the tribulations of America, though they figure the most prominently throughout the book, but all of the worldwide revolutions and protests which took place that year, to include Poland, France, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Canada, etc. The backgrounds leading to the various civil conflicts are well covered, some being a multi-generational simmer while others were “a flash in the pan” surprise. A great storyteller, Kurlansky weaves the many various events into a set of common themes. He is always quick to point out where there was overlap and synchronization between the protests, be it merely thematic or more concrete. He also strives to give the point of view of the protest’s opponents and the authorities at the scene; the more successful of whom usually also being the most subdued. All in all, a great book for encompassing a wide spectrum of events into a single thesis of reason. Highly recommended for those wanting to better understand a year whose emotions still influence our politics today while pointing out what was both won and lost in the various events around the world.
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Having loved both Salt and Cod, I am a bit disappointed with 1968. Too Boomerish, really, or better, too white and too male. He is at his best here in the chapters where he spoke to people involved and at his worst when relying too heavily on the New York Times. But he gives the impression that the noble, nonviolent civil rights movement was important mainly as a training ground for white SDSers and the women’s movement gets very little attention, and Black Power was a bad scene and the Black Panthers were no good (the only Panther book he lists in the bibliography is the grotesque distortion by Hugh Pearson) and not only does all that turn me off but then there are also these bits about the aftermath of the “Six Day War” that I also felt was a bit yucky in a Boomer way... the Poland chapter and the Prague Spring stuff was great. Then the Mexico chapter... which was why I wanted to read it in the first place, not knowing much about Mexico’s 68 and hoping for some global context... the Mexico chapter is this great opportunity for him to tell a story most English language readers don’t know, and he actually gets down there to talk to the now grown student radicals who survived... and that chapter was great but he writes that many people wouldn’t talk with him about it... still afraid of PRI thugs... and I am thinking, yeah, they don’t trust you, Mark...
One more thing: this book made me less interested in Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies so that might help me cull some titles from my ridiculous to-read list...
