Interesting book! I started high school (10th grade) in 1968 and by then was already swept up by the 60's wave of political rebellion and anti-war activities, along with my older sister. Was I a Young Socialist? Well, of course -- anything to freak out my Nixon-loving Republican parents. One act of rebellion was, to commemorate Martin Luther King's assassination, we passed out black arm bands at school -- an act that could have gotten us expelled. (Gee, now King has his own holiday. How things have changed.) And we also had our own underground newspaper called -- what else? -- "The Little Red Schoolhouse."

In college, in Mexico in 1972/73, my student friends there told me about the Tlatelolco massacre, which was still fresh in everyone's mind. All these years have passed and I never knew the details, not till I read this book. That chapter on Mexico was the most enlightening for me. And I've even been to that square, not realizing then that it was the location of the massacre: Tlatelolco, the Plaza of the Three Cultures. I also appreciated learning about Prague Spring.

The book was a good introduction to many events that I can now research and learn more about.

I was in eighth grade when 1968 dawned, too immature and self-centered to fully appreciate the truly momentous, spirit-shattering and world-changing events—the effect of which is still felt 50 years later. And that is why I read this outstanding book by Mark Kurlansky. This is not an easy read; it is a history book, after all, and will demand your full attention. But it is so worth the effort and time because it offers perspective.

From Moscow to Mexico, Berkeley to Biafra and Prague to Poland, the year was remarkable because of multiple and varied cries for revolution—everywhere. Students protested in almost every first-world country, and in some cases lost their lives for their efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president. Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. More military members died in Vietnam in 1968 than any other year of that war. Chicago police went berserk at the Democratic National Convention, beating innocent citizens. Mexico massacred protesting students weeks before hosting the summer Olympics with the theme of brotherly love and friendship. It was a summer of Black Power and boycotts, burning draft cards and burning bras. And television changed it all, bringing these perilous events far and wide into the privacy of our living rooms.

This prodigiously researched history book recounts all the year's events, focusing especially on the citizen protests. It was these activities that more than anything else made people realize they were not powerless and—even more important—could not be ignored by the powerful.

"Remember 1968" should be a rallying cry for everyone who feels repressed in any day and age, and this book is the how-to instruction manual.

Mil novecientos sesenta y ocho fue el año más sangriento en la historia de la Guerra de Vietnam; de los asesinatos de Bobby Kennedy y Martin Luther King; de los movimientos estudiantiles en Estados Unidos, México, Francia, Alemania y Polonia; de las Olimpiadas de la Ciudad de México y la matanza de Tlatelolco; de los disturbios raciales en ciudades estadounidenses; de la Primavera de Praga y de la invasión soviética a Checoslovaquia; de la irrupción de la segunda ola del feminismo en América; de la misión Apolo 8 y del primer vuelo tripulado alrededor de la luna.

Para celebrar el aniversario número 50 de aquel año en el que “mayo duró 12 meses”, les recomiendo esta obra del historiador Mark Kurlansky, quien recorre cada una de las estaciones del 68, relatando los acontecimientos importantes que sacudieron el mundo. Pero no es sólo eso, sino que para comprender cada suceso y fenómeno, nos cuenta los antecedentes que llevaron al fatídico año, y las consecuencias que tendría a corto y mediano plazo.

El libro fue una gran fuente de información sobre muchos asuntos de los que no sabía casi nada. Por ejemplo, ignoraba que el movimiento estudiantil polaco había sido tan grande e importante, y desconocía los detalles de lo ocurrido en lugares como Alemania, Inglaterra, Italia o Canadá.

Otros aspectos importantes de la geopolítica de los 60 son abordados, como la situación de Israel, la guerra en Biafra, el gobierno de Pierre Trudeau en Canadá y la consolidación del régimen castrista en Cuba. Tampoco podría dejar de lado la parte cultural, con la música, los libros y el cine que hicieron historia, la forma en la que la TV estaba cambiando la manera en que la gente se informaba, o cómo las drogas recreativas constituían el corazón de un auténtico movimiento cultural.

El libro cierra con reflexiones sobre lo que ha significado el 68 para la posteridad y contiene lecciones valiosas para las generaciones que quieran hacer el intento de cambiar el mundo. Qué estrategias resultaron efectivas, qué errores se cometieron, qué abusos por parte del poder no se pueden permitir otra vez, en qué promesas ya no se puede confiar más, pero sobre todo, cómo la fuerza de la juventud, impulsada por ideales, es capaz de poner de cabeza el orden social y sembrar las semillas de cambios venideros.

We are living in a year in which people are shocked by the polarization of politics and the prevalence of political violence. Kurlansky argues that 1968 “was at the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world” and of image-driven politics. He does a good job of reminding us how shockingly violent the year 1968 was, across many nations. He covers, among other things:

The race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: https://is.gd/AU7EZb
The assassination of Robert Kennedy: https://is.gd/qpekwS
The student riots against the war in Vietnam in Berkeley and elsewhere: https://is.gd/e8AhIL
The My Lai massacre in Vietnam: https://is.gd/EokwWX
The police riot at the Chicago Democratic National Convention: https://is.gd/sGgUEt
The Paris student riots and General De Gaulle sneaking away from the palace: https://is.gd/26GbUH
The Soviet invasion of Prague: https://is.gd/SAmbfG
The massacre of Mexican students at Tlatelolco: https://is.gd/UhkVyt

It also has a good bibliography for further reading.

I only had an inkling as to what a pivotal year 1968 was before this book. It seemed like the whole planet had an almost coincidental revolution. Viet Nam was a big part of it, but the conflicts between authority and protest, communism/capitalism, feminism, economic disparity, the middle east (of course), all played roles. And it was all brought live (and much less edited) by the new medium of television! Particularly reveling were the parts about Abbie Hoffman (hilarious) and the Chicago Democratic Convention, Nixon's sneaky reappearance on the national stage, France's student protests (and Servain-Schreiber's prescient predictions! omg), the Czech/Soviet showdown (w/ Dubcek an unlikely democrat, in power for a mere 230 days), the Mexico Olympics and the most brutal of repressions there, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller (who basically gave the election to Nixon by pulling out of the presidential race temporarily, thus changing the Republican party forever from a more liberal party to the Nixon/Reagan/Bush axis we were left with), and throughout all, in the background and foreground, Viet Nam.

I was very impressed with Kurlansky's styly, as I was with Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (he's also authored books about Salt, the Basques, frozen foods, the Caribbean, Oysters, and many others. Amazingly eclectic). I look forward to reading more of his.

This is a really good book.

A very good distillation of the social feeling, collective consciousness of youth and subsequent political events of the time, as the post-war generation begins to come of age.

It goes into the details of events surrounding the Tet Offensive, the Prague Spring and the later failed invasion of Prague by the Soviets that lead to the downfall of communism in East Europe. It covers the boredom and frustration in France that lead to the 22 March Movement that would culminate in the student protests of May 1968 in Paris, the Biafran war, the Mexican student revolt and the dawn of the feminist movement.

It covers mostly the thinking, actions, theories of intellectual groups, i.e. frustrated students not liking what their leadership is deciding on their behalf, whether that was France and the 22 Mars Movement lead by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany le rouge) or America and the anti-Vietnam movement.

Four factors merged to create 1968:
- the example of the civil rights movement, which at the time was so new and original;
- a generation that felt so different and alienated that it rejected all forms of authority;
- a war that was so hated so universally around the world that it provided a cause for all the rebels seeking one;
- and all of this occurring at the moment television was coming of age but was still new enough not to have yet become controlled, distilled, and packaged the way it is today.

The protest of students surprised many in power, they were an unexpected source of revolution, (more used to workers strikes) that caught politicians and leaders by surprise, not realising the revolutionary feeling rising from within, from their own children/grandchildren.

France might never have had a 1968 had it not been for an overzealous government. Looking back Cohn-Bendit said:

"If the government had not thought they had to crush the movement, we never would have reached this point of a fight for liberation. There would have been a few demonstrations and that would have been it."

The French government had thought of arresting him, but according to legend, de Gaulle rejected the idea, saying, "One doesn't arrest Voltaire."

This generation, with its distrust of authority and understanding of television, and raised in the finest school of political activism, the American civil rights movement, was uniquely suited to disrupt the world. And then they were offered a war they did not want to fight and did not think should be fought... The young people of the generation, the ones who were in college in 1968, were the draftees. These younger member of the sixties generation, the people of 1968, had a fury in them that had not seen before.

Everyone had an opinion on the generation gap and much of what was said contributed to inciting rebellion. One of de Gaulle's men André Malaraux, denied there was a gap, insisting the problem was the normal struggle of youth to grow up, while a supreme court justice Earl Warren referred to it as a need to resolve tensions between 'the daring of youth' and the 'the mellow practicality' of the more mature.

The protests in Paris drew in more and more protestors, Cohn-Bendit was as surprised as the police by the students, but was unable to control it. "Violent revolution is in the French culture," he said (as a mature man in reflection on these earlier times). "We tried to avoid an escalation. I thought the violence as a dynamic was destroying the movement. The message was getting lost in the violence as it always does."

It was a tonic for a population that had grown bored. Today photographs and film footage available from that time are of violence. To the average French participants however, it wasn't about violence at all, and that is not what they most remember. It was about a pastime for which the French have a rare passion: talking.

Ultimately it resulted in reform not revolution, revolutions are said to form slowly as they build their base and ideology, the students hadn't garnered the support of workers or the wider population, however there was an explosion against a suffocatingly stagnant society.

The real sense of 1968 was a tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, of people talking, talking on the street, in the universities, in the theatres. A whole suystem of order and authority and tradition was swept aside. Much of the freedom today began in '68.

Cohn-Bendit was deported and it was ten years before he was allowed back in.

A rejection of materialism and a distaste for corporate culture were dismissed as not wanting to work. A persistent claim of a lack of hygiene was used to dismiss a different way of dressing, whereas neither beatniks nor hippies were particularly dirty.

Who were they reading?

Perhaps the single most influential writer for young people in the sixties was Algerian born French Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus...In the 1960's students all over the world read The Plague and interpreted it as a call to activism.

A Martinique-born psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon became an international figure after he wrote a book in 1961 called Les damnés de la terre. Translated into 25 languages, the book was read by U.S. college students under the title, The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon too had been in Algeria, opposing French policy, becoming a leader in the fight for Algerian independence. His book examined the the psychology not only of colonialism but of overthrowing colonialism and the kind of new man required to build a postcolonial society.

The American activists wanted a stop to the aggression. The Europeans wanted a defeat of colonialism - they wanted the US to be crushed just as the European colonial powers had been.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan became the most read books of the 1960's after the author was asked to conduct a survey of her classmates, fellow graduates of Smith College, which inspired to write a book about a series of false beliefs she labelled the feminine mystique - that women and men were very different and that it was masculine to want a career and feminine to find happiness in being dominated by a husband and his career and to be busy raising children.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was equally popular, a condemnation of marriage and critique of woman's role in society. It was said that before Friedan, de Beauvoir and others like them, a woman did not have the vocabulary (or perhaps too a publisher) to articulate her feelings of justice.

Poetry was important and seemed to matter to people, there was even telephone service in New York City in 1968 that offered a "dial a poem" service. Allen Ginsberg is mentioned, Robert Lowell, Rod McKuen was the bestselling poet of 68, but the one who I found most intriguing and isn't mentioned in the book was Diane di Prima and her Revolutionary Letters.

I'll be looking elsewhere to learn more about the attraction of communal living and the 'love' side of this era, and the woman's perspective, as 1968 was a trigger point for the launch of a new wave of feminism and while extensive, this is by it's nature a very masculine reporting and perception of that era.

It feels ironic to read this on 17 March 2020 in France, where at midday we go into a 15 day era of total confinement, unable to leave our homes without an 'attestation de déplacement', not because of revolution but due to a viral pandemic.

The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of the population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced....And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is a wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.

I remember this year vividly.
Excellent work!

A great book, providing a detailed history of one of the most important single years in the 20th century. The author, Mark Kurlansky, is most well known for food related books (Cod, Salt, Big Oyster), so I was surprised to see him as an author of this topic but was certainly impressed with his work. He was an admitted participant of 1968 and starts off by explaining how his holistic research of that year gave him a very different perspective than what he remembered. He puts 1968 on parallel with 1848 or the 1780s as a specific period of time which greatly changed the future for a wide swath of humanity. He covers not just the tribulations of America, though they figure the most prominently throughout the book, but all of the worldwide revolutions and protests which took place that year, to include Poland, France, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Canada, etc. The backgrounds leading to the various civil conflicts are well covered, some being a multi-generational simmer while others were “a flash in the pan” surprise. A great storyteller, Kurlansky weaves the many various events into a set of common themes. He is always quick to point out where there was overlap and synchronization between the protests, be it merely thematic or more concrete. He also strives to give the point of view of the protest’s opponents and the authorities at the scene; the more successful of whom usually also being the most subdued. All in all, a great book for encompassing a wide spectrum of events into a single thesis of reason. Highly recommended for those wanting to better understand a year whose emotions still influence our politics today while pointing out what was both won and lost in the various events around the world.

Like a veteran seamstress with disparate patterns and fabrics, Kurlansky is able to weave together the narratives of multiple nations’ students, dissidents, and activists, who fight to create similar kinds of change across continents . Movements in Mexico, Paris, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and America speak to, motivate, and celebrate one another. Kurlansky has done an immense amount of research, and the pacing of all these stories is somehow an easily digestible tour de force. Recommendation is made for you to read it...now.

Fast-paced and hard-driving account of the worldwide protest movements and political history of 1968.I learned a lot here, I hadn’t even heard of Biafra before. Kurlansky doesn’t claim to an objective viewpoint, and I did sense his underlying cynicism as well as his admiration and (pride? Was he a student protester?) of the protest movements. The structure is loose here, spider-webbing influenced by chronology, geography, and topic but not limited by any of them. I felt the Women’s movement was given quite short-shrift, but I was fascinated by the comprehensive discussion of the Czech spring and the Russian invasion response to it. I had decided he wasn’t going to talk about anything as trivial as the moonshot, but he finally got to it and I liked how he used it to wrap things up. Worth reading (or listening to). I listened with Christopher Cazenove reading. Good reading overall, but from time to time his British accent bothered me for some reason. (S. Carolinians has a short “i” not a long one for example.)

Boy, this book sure brought back memories since I lived through those years as a teenager! Kurlansky does a great job of comparing the protest movements taking place simultaneously in the various countries in the world. In the U.S. the author focused on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. In Europe and Mexico it is opposition to oppressive governments both Communist or non-communist governments alike. These oppressive governments used similar tactics to maintain control of society. Also in Europe there was opposition to the US war in Vietnam. The author also explains the new found role the media, especially tv, is playing in these protests. In another chapter, the author uses the theme of poetry to tie together music, philosophy, the counter culture, protests, and presidential politics. Kurlansky maintains that because of the events in 1968; how the US pursued war and sold it to the public changed, how a new geopolitical order emerged, how the world became media driven, and finally as a result of activist youth in 1968 a new generation of leaders emerged. These leaders will be involved in journalism, politics or like me, teachers. The hope of 1968 was that people around the world refused to be silent in the face of oppression and wrongs in the world. A good read.

For no good reason, I assumed that this book would only deal with 1968 in the US, but the author covered many other countries as well. In many of those countries, I wasn’t terribly interested in what was happening, although 1968 was a major year of upheaval around the world. I learned a lot that I didn’t know earlier and I’m glad that I did finish reading the book.

there was an enormous amount of detail in this book and no author should be criticized for that. His style was good but not great.when I got bogged down on too much detail in something. I wasn't terribly interested in, I just moved on and skipped over what didn't it interest me.