Rating: 
Summary: A book of history: human, comprehensive, courageous
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: I disagree with historical facts
Review: Mark Kurlansky makes virulent anti-Polish statements in his book, that are unacceptable for a publication that is supposed to have any historical value. For example, he makes a historical slander that "... during World War II many Poles... cooperated in the murder of ALL but 275,000 of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland." Despite risking death of entire families, MANY Poles saved thousands of Jews during brutal German accupation. It is enough to visit Yad Vashem's Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, to see that the majority of names are of Poles. Mark Kurlansky in his dedication talks about knowing "truth from lies", while he does just the opposite in his book. He mocks Polish "heroic image of themselves" as "unshared by and little known in the outside world". He slanders 3 million Gentile Poles who died during World War II fighting and being murdered by Hitler. If events like heroic Warsaw uprising of Poles against Germans in the summer of 1944; Polish pilots' participation in victorious battle of England; resistance against communism, are "little known" or are "unshared", it is because of pseudo-historical books like this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyed the book--until page 356, that is
Review: Mr Kurlansky hopscotches over the world to sketch a portrait of the tumultuous year of 1968, and ironically, the farther away he is from the United States the sharper his analysis becomes. Alexander Dubcek's bewilderment over being betrayed by the Soviets in the "Prague Spring" is the most compelling story, though Kurlansky's sly depiction of the imperious DeGaulle runs a close second. He also quotes at length intellectuals such as Servan-Schreiber and Marshall McLuhan, whose prognostications on the evolving world order are nothing short of amazing. Nevertheless, I think that Kurlansky's own nostalgia for those days (which he freely admits to) and his uncritical acceptance of everything that Mark Rudd tells him (Mr. Rudd is thanked for his honesty in the preface) ultimately leads the author into a soft-focus finish that discredits everything that went before it. He talks vaguely of protests in Europe, without bothering to mention that the Red Brigade morphed into a terrorist organization that murdered Moro and General Dozier. With a nod and a wink he says that the Weather Underground did more harm to itself than to anyone else--after all, how could a group that was so culturally self-conscious to take its name from a Dylan song really be harmful to anyone? Well, Mr. Kurlansky, the Weather Underground, no matter what its technical incompetence, was planning on bombing a military officer's club, and I was under the impression that those people are called terrorists, and NOT "their own worst enemies." What a pity that the book eneded on such a sour note for me. I'll stick to reading his more narrowly focused books, and avoid anything that demands a more intellectual analysis from the author, particularly if his own emotions compromise his ability to judge his material clearly.
Rating:
Summary: HISTORY FROM THE LEFT
Review: MR. KURLANSKY ADMITS HIS BIAS IN THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK AND HE ISN'T KIDDING. EVERYTHING THE STUDENTS DID--EVERYTHING!-WAS WONDERFUL AND MORAL AND, OF COURSE, THE UNITED STATES WAS THE EVIL EMPIRE. IT IS ALMOST PATHETIC THE WAY THESE PEOPLE ROMANTICIZE THE '60s. ONE STAR FOR MR. KURLANSKY FOR BEING HONEST ABOUT HIS BIAS. THIS IS IN RESPONSE TO THE REVIEWER WHO SAID I HADN'T READ THIS LEFT WING JUNK. I READ EVERY BOOK I REVIEW AND I SUFFERED THROUGH EVERY PAGE OF THIS DISASTER.
Rating:
Summary: Old News
Review: Part hagiography, part self congratulation, Kurlansky tells us the tale of a generation that changed the world so much that the world is now fundamentally the same as it was before, only more so (that is, the world is increasingly state capitalist). The GI generation bored the young of their era with war stories. The generation of '68 demonstrates that anti-war stories can be even more boring. Kurlansky tendentiously offers us more of the same, only more tediously.At 464 pages, the book is too long - but not nearly as long as the longwindedness of the generation of 1968. I recommend the book - as a wonderful example of self parody.
Rating:
Summary: When 1968 becomes 2004
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Yeah, right...like O.J. could have gotten into Cal
Review: The author states on page 19 (of 381) that on January 1, 1968, a huge crowd watched O.J. Simpson rush for the University of California against Indiana in the Rose Bowl. Sorry, but unlike the other heroes in this book, Mr. Simpson didn't spend the 60s in Berkeley - he played for USC, way down in LA. Despite that glaring error, this book was an interesting read about a time on which anyone culturally literate today must be aware. The history is well-balanced between what happend in the U.S. and Europe, and the chapter on Mexico in 1968 revealed information that was new to me. The chapter on the 1968 democratic convention was also very informative. I recommend this book to anyone with a general knowledge of the late 60s who wants a good review of important events of that time.
Rating: 
Summary: An absorbing overview of an important year
Review: The twelve months of 1968 represented a major turning point in the social and political development of many countries worldwide. Kurlansky has written an absorbing book on a pivotal year. While he covers what happened in a lot of places and provides considerable information about the trend of unrest experienced in diverse societies, it's a launching pad for further study. Another excellent book on the situation in 1968, with a focus on the events before and after the decisive March 1968 student protests in Poland, is "Forced Out: The Fate of Polish Jewry in Communist Poland."
Rating:
Summary: If You Haven't Lived Through Read About It.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: That Was the Year That Was
Review: 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.
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