1968: The Year That Rocked the World [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

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.

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.

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.