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1968: The Year That Rocked the World

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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.

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.

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.

Mark Kurlansky has written the most important book ever published about one of this nation's most galvanizing, divisive, and imposing years in modern history. Baby boomers who lived through this history as college students will discover context and multi-faceted details about how this year changed them indelibly. Younger readers will gain a richer understanding about how the events of 1968 benefit them today, including feminism, racial integration, and a healthy distrust of powerful elites. (Imagine what it was like to be expelled from college because you openly cohabitated with your romantic partner.) The book breaks through U.S. ethnocentricity about this remarkable year by presenting graphic images of 1968 from Paris to Prague and Mexico City to the former Soviet Union. The author demonstrates without apology or hesitation that 1968 was a worldwide cultural revolution that today benefits all Western societies and has brought greater freedom and social equality to countless people. Kurlansky is to be praised, not criticized, for his extraordinary accomplishment, the painstaking research, and an enjoyable writing style that injects humanity into historical details.

There are years that are indelibly embedded in a nations psyche because of specific events. In the US, 1963 comes to mind. There are times that are embedded in world consciousness in a more or less similar way-though these tend to be more pronounced, longer periods of unique historical impact-World War II and the Great Depression come to mind.

1968 stands as a unique year that is indelibly embedded in world consciousness. 1968 stands as the culmination of the birth of the globally connected economy. Seeds of youthful unrest and rebellion sprouted up, seemingly spontaneously, on a world wide scale in a more or less coincident fashion. The two above enumerated facts are singularly interrelated, and that's the key to reading Mark Kurlansky's 1968 : The Year That Rocked the World.

The seeds that led to the tumult of 1968 arose out of the ongoing globalization of economic infrastructure-particularly in terms of instant, globally available communications-as well as an historically unique alignment of youthful rejection of established political hierarchy and authority in a wide variety of places for a lot of coincident but largely unrelated reasons.

Kurlansky both succeeds and fails in his efforts to establish, organize and explain these phenomena. The author has a fairly unique and eclectic resume as salt, cod and such have been previous topics of study for him. There is obviously a big difference in trying to chronicle the aspects of a year as opposed to an object or substance. Kurlansky is not altogether successful in making the leap.

The dynamic that most clearly pointed to the tumult to come in the late 1960's first became apparent with the rise of the Beatles as an international cultural phenomenon
In 1963. The Beatles represented an almost cosmic change in cultural DNA across almost all borders. Youth worldwide had found a technological and social mechanism of interconnectedness and communication that has continued ever since (witness the Internet).

Suddenly, there was a worldwide outlet fore communicating the ingrained aspects of youthful rebellion. This rebellion was being stoked by the byproducts of the longstanding, ossifying effects of the cold war as well as the burgeoning upheaval towards personal empowerment that such movements as the Civil Rights movement embodied.

These rebellious influences had widely disparate origins, aims and expression, from the "flower-power", anti-war movement in America to the Cultural Revolution in china.

Kurlansky does an admirable job of covering a lot of this ground (though not all of it-the Cultural Revolution is largely ignored, for example). His stream-of-consciousness style of writing in this instance does much to evoke the emotional tenor of the times though it does little to help organize the historical aspects of this material in any sort of disciplined way. He also does a fairly admirable amount of analysis, in a sort of dissembling way, as to cause and effect issues.

However, the man has a particular view and bias towards he "flower-power" aspects of the situation. Moreover, he seems to be perpetually in search of understanding himself, not the sort of situation that lends itself to meaningful historical conclusions.

In the end we are left with a unique, informative genial mess of a book that stands up well as a sort of thoughtful, introspective, historically oriented memoir but a book that must be considered a failure as any sort of serious historical exercise.

Having heard much of the separate events occured in 1968, it was interesting to see a well written attempt to unify the events into one coherent theme. The author describes in detail the background to each event and the actions taken by the main leaders of such movements -- a unifying theme seems to be that the movements were almost self driven, with figureheads at the top with no true leadership. Also part of the unifying theme was that these movements were led by students, who for the first time were aware of other student movements around the world and seem to not want to be left behind.

The stories focus on the communist bloc (Poland and Czechoslovakia), where there was strong repression of the student movement. The problem, for example, in Poland, was that the students were mostly the children of the Communist Party leaders, so the clashes put on opposite sides different generations of the same people. Such seemed to be the case in the Czech case as well.

The movements in France were also astounding in their magnitude, with leaders who did not lead much, but getting to a complete paralysis of the country and the downfall of many in the government. Movements in the US, especially at Berkeley and Columbia, has strong effects on the American psyche, as the war in Vietnam went on and civil rights movements were heating up and taking a turn towards violence (away from Martin Luther King and into the Black Panthers). The killing of Bobby Kennedy was also a significant event to shape the election year in the US.

I highly recommend this book to those interested in history -- it puts many events in perspective. The Prague Spring, for example, is much more well understood knowing the Communist party dynamics at the time and the international student movement raging on in the west. One should have a good time reading it, while we hope another such year occurs in our lifetimes.

Though I wouldn't be born for years after the tragic night they killed Bobby Kennedy, I remember it well. My father was there. Nineteen Sixty-Eight was a watershed year for him as it was for Amercia and the world. Not only did Bobby lose his life that year, but Martin did too. It was also the year of the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, that war America wanted to forget even while it was still going on. It was a year of riots in both the aftermath of Mr. King's assassination and in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. Mr. Dubcek rose and fell in Czechoslovakia, Mr. Nixon became president, we saw TV from space and U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in protest during the medals ceremony at the Olympic games in Mexico City.

All of this and more I'd been raised with, had learned at my father's knee when I was a child, reminded of again at his side when I was a girl and later when I was a young woman. These events shaped him, made him into a wonderful liberal, always willing to give the shirt off his back to help a stranger in need. But my dad's gone now and I haven't thought about 1968 in years, not until I saw this wonderful book in my local bookstore.

Mr. Kurlansky has delivered a book that brought back my dad, a book for all of us who were born so long after the fact and a book, I believe, that is must reading even for all of those who lived during that turbulent year that rocked the world. It's a year worth remembering, worth learning about, worth knowing.

This a great look at the year 1968. The book covers student turmoil and events around the globe. This book is a great read for those of us feeling down about what's happening in America today. It reminds us there is always hope in the young. It also reminds us of what happens when there are no independent voices in the media, and why another 1968 will be far harder to pull off ever again. Where's Abbie Hoffman now that we need him?

This is an exciting and important book that both entertains and enlightens ones perspective on this year in American History whether you lived it or need to understand it. At the end of the book Mark Kurlansky says many people who lived it can today recognize other "68ers". I certainly could recognize my self at 24 years old in 1968. That year I got married, was reclassified 1-A and got drafted, shook Bobby Kennedy's hand two days before he was killed. As Dickens would say, it was the best of times and the worst of times. The interesting thing Kurlansky does is put the student movement and anti-war movements in more of an international and cultural contex. The single unifying theme is that the culture in all countries was very authoritarian; government and the ruling generation were neither interested nor flexible about cultural change and were wrapped up in taking sides in the cold war. (Just think of France and de Gaulle.) Then along comes a new generation, who might be recognized as libertarians on steroid, who questioned and wanted more tolerance and freedom. A cultural revolution that saw war and was against it, saw injustice in race relations and wanted to correct them, saw women as second class homemakers only and wanted to liberate them, and then saw personal freedom as a core principle. In the United States these new values conflicted with both Democratic Liberals and Republican of the new right which grew in support of Nixon as a negative response to these anti-authoritarian values. In all this you can see the makings of today's Blue and Red states and the repressive culture of Southern Conservatism that runs though much of today's Republican Party. Kurlansky covers a wide range of countries and movements, but most compelling is his telling of the rise and fall of Alexander Dubcek and the fall of his new Democratic Czechoslovakian Communist Party. The reaction to this from the extreme authoritarian Soviet Union was an invasion which turned out to be a disaster for all parties. And you see the seeds for the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. This is a brilliant and entertaining book. (I read 1968 just after reading David McCullough's 1776 which is also about a generational divide and people with passion who were willing to fight authoritarianism. I wonder where and who these people are today?)

Something changed in 1968. It is called "almost everything." The author takes readers through every wrenching month of that unprecedented year, drawing on painstaking research and the art of a very fine and deliberate writer. More than any other achievement, of which there are many in this book, Kurlansky gives his readers a chance to better understand today ... right now. So much of our current national debates about Iraq, the Patriot Act, and our teetering moral authority in world affairs, springboards in some way from that year. We were given many lessons then, some forgotten, many resurfacing as we again find our nation confronting major obstacles in world affairs. 1968 surely requires the critical reader to consider what we learned then and what it means now. This is a book about history ... repeating itself. Read it for greater context; read it for insights; but most of all, read it to examine the most crucial issues confronting a nation ... today.