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Solzhenitsyn's gripping epic masterpiece, the searing record of four decades of Soviet terror and oppression, in one abridged volume, authorized by the author
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1968: The Year That Rocked the World
Author: Mark Kurlansky
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 thatTV 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.
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. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
"The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia," says Kurlansky (Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History) in this appraisal of many unrelated worldwide protests that occurred that year. Unlike Jules Witcover in The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America and Lewis Gould in 1968: The Election that Changed America, Kurlansky devotes little attention to the presidential election, focusing instead on protests in Czechoslovakia, France, and Mexico, as well as those in a number of South American and European countries. The book includes fascinating stories about prominent movement leaders, notably Czech Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcvaek and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the French student movement. Kurlansky concludes that 1968 was unique because of a convergence of the disdain for the Vietnam War throughout the world, a widespread mood of alienation among youth, the success of the Civil Rights Movement, and improvements in the media that brought visuals of world events into homes. Strongly recommended for most public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/03.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A masterful chronicle of a year when the world was living dangerously and everybody's hair was afire. Doing what he does best, Kurlansky (Salt, 2002, etc.) brings a descriptive glow to his subject, holding it up to the light and turning it in his hands. Kurlansky is not so much concerned with exegesis as narrative scope, though he's also happy to wade among the knots, thorns, and bafflements of 1968. It was a terrible, Dickensian year for the human toll it took in Biafra and Vietnam, across Europe, and in the US, but it was thrilling too, "a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that are wrong with the world." The author, who was 20 that year and very much a child of those times, makes real the passion that pervaded the air: the widespread antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian movements; the student-and, in some cases, worker-uprisings in Paris, Berlin, Prague, Mexico City, New York, and elsewhere; Tom Stoppard, Peter Brooks, and Julian Beck shaking up the theater; Jacek Kur-n, Adam Michnik, and others acting as reluctant heroes in Poland; Tommie Smith and Lee Evans clenching their fists from the Olympic platform; SNCC eclipsing SCLC, and the rise of Black Power; television networks broadcasting undistilled and unpackaged news; feminism rising again. Instead of wanting to Be Like Mike, young people in 1968 aspired to act "como Che!" Assassinations, invasions, napalmings, and near-genocides made a grim backdrop for the year's millenarian dreams. Kurlansky is handy with the quick character sketch, but celebrities don't overwhelm the writing; he's more interested in context and events, circumstances and consequences, a goodexample being how he threads the US presidential race and its many permutations through the course of the narrative. Says so much so well about a year that still steals your breath away, even with so many of its hopes dashed. (Illustrations throughout) Author tour. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy
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