1968: The Year That Rocked the World [Hardcover]

Mark Kurlansky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2003

In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.

With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as 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 birth of the women’s movement, and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe.

Everything was disrupted. In the Middle East, Yasir Arafat’s guerilla organization rose to prominence . . . both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale were forced to shut down by protesters . . . the Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of the crown for drug use . . . the Olympics were a disaster, with the Mexican government having massacred hundreds of students protesting police brutality there . . . and the Miss America pageant was stormed by feminists carrying banners that introduced to the television-watching public the phrase “women’s liberation.”
Kurlansky shows how the coming of live television made 1968 the first global year. It was the year that an amazed world watched the first live telecast from outer space, and that TV news expanded to half an hour. For the first time, Americans watched that day’s battle–the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive–on the evening news. Television also shocked the world with seventeen minutes of police clubbing demonstrators at the Chicago convention, live film of unarmed students facing Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, and a war of starvation in Biafra. The impact was huge, not only on the antiwar movement, but also on the medium itself. The fact that one now needed television to make things happen was a cultural revelation with enormous consequences.

In many ways, this momentous year led us to where we are today. Whether through youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media, Mark Kurlansky shows how, in 1968, twelve volatile months transformed who we are as a people. But above all, he gives a new understanding to the underlying causes of the unique historical phenomenon that was the year 1968. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written–full of telling anecdotes, penetrating analysis, and the author’s trademark incisive wit–1968 is the most important book yet of Kurlansky’s noteworthy career.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Given its broad and vibrant subject, it would be quite difficult for a writer of any proficiency to pen a boring book on 1968, and Mark Kurlansky has indeed pulled together an entertaining and enlightening popular history with 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. With the Vietnam War and Soviet repression providing sparkplugs in the East and West, student movements heated up in Berkeley, Prague, Mexico City, Paris, and dozens of other hotspots. With youth in ascendancy, music, film, and athletics became generational battlegrounds between opposition forces that couldn't be more appalled with one another. Not so fortuitously, the Summer Olympics in Mexico City and a presidential election in the United States conspired to elevate the tension higher as months passed. Kurlansky is skilled at concisely capturing the personalities behind the conflicts, whether they be heartbroken Czech leader Alexander Dubcek as Eastern Bloc troops violently suppress his nation's uprising or respected veteran newsman Walter Cronkite reluctantly editorializing against the war in Vietnam. The author is more than willing to choose heroes (the doomed Robert Kennedy) and villains (victorious presidential candidate Richard Nixon), and clearly sides with the rebels in most cases. In general, Kurlansky is more adept at covering the political front than he is the equally revolutionary arts world, and it's apparent that any chapter in this book could be expanded into a book of its own. One's expectation is that captivated readers will view 1968 as a portal into a deeper exploration of a fascinating time. --Steven Stolder

From Publishers Weekly

By any measure, it was a remarkable year. Mentioning the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the Prague Spring and its backlash gives only the merest impression of how eventful and transformative the year must have felt at the time. As Kurlansky (Cod, Salt, etc.) has made the phrase "changed the world" a necessary component of subtitles for books about mundane objects, his choice to focus on a year that so "rocked" the world is appropriate. To read this book is to be transported to a very specific past at once more naive and more mature than today; as Kurlansky puts it, it was a time of "shocking modernism" and "quaint innocence," a combination less contradictory than it first appears. The common genesis of demonstrations occurring in virtually every Western nation was the war in Vietnam. Without shortchanging the roles of race and age, Kurlansky shrewdly emphasizes the rise of television as a near-instantaneous (and less packaged than today) conduit of news as key to the year's unfolding. To his credit, Kurlansky does not overdo Berkeley at the expense of Paris or Warsaw or Mexico City. The gains and costs of the new ethic of mass demonstration are neatly illustrated by the U.S. presidential campaign: the young leftists helped force the effective abdication of President Lyndon Johnson - and were rewarded with "silent majority" spokesman Richard Nixon. 1968 is a thorough and loving (perhaps a bit too loving of the boomer generation) tapestry - or time capsule.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; First Edition edition (December 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345455819
• ISBN-13: 978-0345455819
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #904,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Kurlansky is a New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard Award-winning author. He is the recipient of a Bon Appétit American Food and Entertaining Award for Food Writer of the Year, and the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award for Food Book of the year.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful whirlwind tour of the eventful year, December 30, 2003

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Hardcover)

This wonderful new account of the year 1968 gives one a whirlwind tour through the upheavals of that seminal year. From Cuba to China to Czechslovakia and Poland this boo does it all. A wide survey of everything from the Chicago 7 to the role of TV and disappearance of mini-skirts. Kurlansky is the master of story telling. He weaves in topics like the Jewish role in the Polish protests of 68', the Biafran war in Nigeria and the shooting of protestors in Mexico. Every subject is covered thoroughly so that you know the characters and feel the times. This is simply a very readable interesting account of a year that changed the world and still affects how we think about 20th century history.

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walking the tightrope of history..., January 13, 2004

By 

Christopher Betche (Jeffersonville, Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Hardcover)

Every college professor will tell you that history is more than a study of dates and events. Only by looking at the long term and greater societal trends can true understanding be gained. Mark Kurlansky proves this belief dramatically wrong in his newest, and best work to date, 1968. The research alone must have taken years, to say nothing of the narrative flow and care in crafting the book. What happened to make this one year so important? How about Vietnam in full swing complete with the Tet Offensive, the Nigerian oil war, Czechoslovakia moving toward democracy only to be invaded by the Soviets, Muhammad Ali being convicted of draft evasion, student demonstrations of every kind from Mexico to France, Martin Luther King being assassinated, Cuba perceived as the most exciting nation in the world, Robert Kennedy looking like the next president only to be killed, the cartoon-like atmosphere of the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago including seventeen minutes of televised police brutality, the Black Power salutes of Olympic medal winners, and the orbiting of the moon by Apollo 8? And most amazingly, Kurlansky ties it all together; interconnecting the many separate and diverse movements and moments and showing how they affected one another. He also retains the human touch with numerous quotations and interviews with the people who were there. This is history, pure and untainted, as close as you are likely to get without experiencing it. It is often said that those who lived through historical events are unaware of their importance until afterward, but 1968 shows how so many participants were very aware that "the whole world is watching" and they acted accordingly. This book is a must read for those who were there, and even more so for those who weren't. One more good book, and you can shelve Kurlansky right next to Bradley or Ambrose.

39 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, but Uncomprehending, September 27, 2005

By 

Odysseus "A Traveller" (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Hardcover)

Mark Kurlansky's entertaining book amply justifies his thesis that 1968 was a watershed year, in which peoples around the world fundamentally reassessed their visions of themselves and of their governments.

Kurlansky weaves a gripping tale from start to finish: The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic convention in Chicago, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Mexico City Olympics, and so much more.

Kurlansky is at his best in two successive chapters near the book's end. The first of these, on the Democratic national convention, could hardly have misfired, so colorful is the material. But Kurlansky's treatment of the Czech response to the Soviet invasion is even more magnificent. This impressive chapter required Kurlansky to dig much deeper to tease out events that took place behind closed doors in repressive environments.

Kurlansky admits in his introduction that objectivity is nearly impossible when writing about such divisive, impassioned events. Unfortunately, Kurlansky's gift for narrative is accompanied by a shocking lack of perspective on the events of 1968, even at a distance of nearly forty years. For example:

Throughout the book, Kurlansky treats rebellious movements as part of an international piece, glossing over the fundamental difference between resisting the tanks of the Soviet Union, and taking over a building at Columbia University. Such gloss trivializes the bravery of those standing up to totalitarianism at the same time that it exalts actions in the west that sometimes veered towards recreation.

Kurlansky sometimes visibly strains to position the New Left as equal opportunity rejecters of capitalism and communism, sometimes with absurd results. He documents the struggles of visitors to Castro's Cuba to avoid being "seduced" by a tyrant, though his own narrative glosses over Castro's depredations into approving nods towards Castro's policies on health care, as if dictators for millennia haven't attempted to buy their populace's liberties with material giveaways. When Allen Ginsburg is given a chance to ask a skeptical question of Castro, he asks about the illegality of marijuana, blind buffoonery in context, but not presented so in Kurlansky's narrative.

Similar strains occur in the chapter on France, where Kurlansky makes much of DeGaulle's dismissal of student demonstrations as simply a symptom of not wanting to study. But despite several pages on the unrest in France, Kurlansky fails to substantiate that they were about anything of consequence. The reader is left feeling as perplexed as deGaulle.

Kurlansky treats the schism among the civil rights movement blandly as a morally neutral disagreement over tactics - violence or non-violence - between individuals with shared objectives. From a distance, we can see that the pursuit of power by violent ends is a tragic tendency as old as humanity. It is neither new nor exculpatory for such activities to be accompanied by a sense of higher moral purpose. The passions of people are the reason that western democracies work as well as they do, constraining these tendencies through power-sharing, and providing other avenues to political power. The fact that democracies sometimes fall short of these ideals does not legitimate violent action as a method of societal decision-making, as opposed to a last resort against others' coercive violence.

Towards the end of the book, Kurlansky's lack of perspective veers from the sloppy to the outrageous. Three especially deplorable comments stand out:

Concerning Castro's executions of political opponents, Kurlansky mocks concerns from American conservatives, suggesting that only hypocrisy could make a supporter of capital punishment shocked by state-sponsored executions. But one needn't be an advocate of capital punishment to see the difference between a fair trial that ends in the execution of a murderer, and a government that simply rounds up political opponents to be killed. Only the most credulous should fall for the favorite argument of dictators: the moral equation of the mistakes made by democracies, with their own systematic repressions.

Kurlansky's lowest moment may be when he writes that Republicans have been winning elections since 1968, principally because white racists outnumber American blacks. By this point in the book, Kurlansky appears almost a New Left's version of a McCarthyist: someone who accuses political opponents of being fundamentally hostile to broadly-shared American visions of rights. The generations that have followed 1968 are far less race-conscious than those of Kurlansky's generation, and indeed, many of them vote Republican.

Finally, Kurlansky spins a whopper when he states that the fall of the Soviet Union began in 1968. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, he says, destroyed its image from the people's revolutionary republic into a brutal repressor. Given that 1968 occurred not only well after the Soviets' similar invasion in Hungary, but after decades of imposition of a slave labor system that imprisoned millions in gulags, this is a breathtakingly absurd statement. 1968 may have been when Kurlansky himself woke up to the nature of the USSR, but not anyone better informed of world events. One suspects that this is Kurlansky's way of dismissing the reality that the USSR would probably not have disintegrated had it not been for the steady pressure from the US, which efforts many of Kurlansky's heroes were actually working against. The statement seems to validate the conservatives' view of the New Left of the time: self-absorbed, out of touch with history and with world events.

Kurlansky is a wonderful storyteller, and his book is worth reading for that alone. This is not a book to read, however, for objective perspective on the events of that turbulent year.