Product Description

It was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was also the year of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago Convention, The Tet Offensive, the French student rebellion, Civil Rights, the generation gap, the birth of the Women's movement and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. In 1968, Mark Kurlansky has recorded the cultural and political history of a world changing year in which television's influence on global events first became apparent and spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously all around the world. The year 1968 encompasses the diverse realms of youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media. This book shows us how one restless, volatile year has helped shape us into who we are today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209899 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Observer
'A riveting, evocative, entertaining read'

About the Author
Mark Kurlansky is author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (winner of the Glenfidish's Best Food Book Award), The Basque History of the World, Salt: A World History and a short story collection The White Man in the Tree (all published by Cape and Vintage). He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

Customer Reviews

A fantastic and informative read
This book totally gripped me in my lust for knowledge for a period I knew far too little about. It has shown me, excatly as it says on the cover, how we got to where we are today. I thoroughly recomend this book to anyone who wants to find out more about the not so distant past and is ready to realise how much and quickly the world has changed since 1968.

A compelling overview of an amazing year
A whole book just about 1968 - what a brilliant idea! And thanks to Mark Kurlansky's effortless prose, this is not only a fascinating book but also an enjoyable one.

'1968' is a broad overview of the major events of the year, including the Tet offensive, the assasination of Robert Kennedy, the Prague Spring, Biafra and the growing black power movemnet. Kurlansky is particularly interested in the growing disaffection of the young on both sides of the Iron curtain and gives a vivid portrayal of the student riots that took place in cities across Europe and the Americas.

I was particularly struck by an account of the Democrat Party convention in Chicago, during which the local police lost control of themsleves and started beating innocent people and smashing cars. As Kurlansky points out, this wasn't the first time something like this had happened, but in 1968 there were now television cameras, recording everything for posterity.

Easy to read, this book is nevertheless scholarly and well-researched. I can't recommend it hughly enough.

Disappointing
For me the book lacked precisely what the subject should have been about: imagination. Its focus is mainly on politics (the emergence of a radical politics); especially American politics. And yet the political is, like Moses, a guide destined never to experience the true wonder of '68, which was more anti-politics and anarchist than commentators such as Kurlansky tend to acknowledge. After all, we only have to look around us to see what happened when the sixty-eighters themselves came to power and became, what, New Labour? There is a quote in one of the chapters that when the '68 generation became thirty years old, it was at least certain that they would not be working in advertising. Au contraire, mon ami. They turned out to be one of the most media-friendly (and savvy and manipulative) generations of them all.

The book is a compendium of the key historico-political movements of the time; and for this reader a very dry read because of that. The true spirit of '68, however, lies elsewhere; in May in Paris (to which only one short chapter, seemingly star-struck by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and informative about little else, is devoted). It is for example surprising that in a book of almost 400 pages there is no mention made of Guy Debord. But that defines the approach taken; an attention to the details of historical sequence and personalities, with little time left for discussion of ideas and the winged flight of the imagination, and its refusal to land, unless life itself changes. Call it romantic, idealist, naive, surreal, whatever; the spirit of 1968 would admit to all of those and much more. But this refusal to conform and to be categorized is still the only thing which has endured, and will continue to endure, from that annus mirabilis, long after the history and the politics have faded from memory, or been romanticized and consumer-packaged out of all recognition, which amounts to much the same thing.