1968: The Year That Rocked the World is a political book so if you are looking for a year-in-review type of thing, you won't find it here. It's not full of movie stars although it mentions some famous movies, and it doesn't talk about fashion or artists or music, although it gives mention to all three. No, this is all about the startling political events of 1968. Not just those in the USA either but the ones all over the world. 1968 was that kind of year. The author even starts out by stating his prejudices and belief that objectivity on the subject of 1968 would be dishonest. I agree. 1968 was that kind of a year also. I was in college, it was the year I turned twenty-one and it was also the year of my marriage. I was not a protester though I was deeply against the war in Vietnam, but protesting came later to the deep South. My views of that year were shaped for the long term by what all of us witnessed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Those are images that will probably never go away for anyone who saw them.

This book is a well done presentation of the state of the whole world in that year and a good way to get quickly acquainted with the major issues of that time around the globe and the unique way they played out in the sixties whether it was in the USA, Europe, or the Communist countries of the Eastern Bloc. All over large groups of students had a desire to change the way things had been to a new way of doing things. The same baby boom had occurred everywhere to some degree so there were lots of young people all seemingly driven by the same desires and fueled by music, sometimes drug use, and, always, impatience.

Were they successful? On the whole, I'd have to say no but they did set in motion changes that eventually came about in many different areas. The story of 1968 is one worth reading. Of how it came to be, what the forces were that brought it to be and why it was so unique make a compelling story.

I was a bit surprised to see how much of this book focused on 1968, outside the US. It told the story of anti-Vietnam protests at Berkeley and Columbia, the rise of feminism, the Prague spring, demonstrations in Poland, the civil war between Nigeria and Biafra, the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the Nixon-Humphrey presidential election, massacres in Mexico, violence by and to blacks over civil rights, demonstrations in Paris, the Olympics in Mexico City, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Quite a heady year of protest- followed in 1969 by the Moon landing.

This is not my normal read. I came upon it quite accidentally. But I must admit that I felt I learned more about what was happening during my graduation year. I knew it was a turbulent time. But I thought 18 was that way for all young adults throughout time.

Pulling out from the individual conflict I did know and felt personally the war versus peace and love but little did I know of what was happening world wide. This book takes the magnifying glass and zeros in on a conflict from the persons at point zero to the followers and then the global ramifications. The glass moves in and out through many points on the maps clarifying much of what has come since.

I am not one to understand history or political standings but I did feel I learned more about my life from the outside in.

The narrator, Christopher Cazenove kept me interested. Of course, his wonderful British accent added a sense of the well-educated mind. I don't think I would have been able to get through a book like this without him.

I listened to this book in the audible version six years after first reading it. I had forgotten from my first reading that much of this book is about events In other parts of the world in addition to the US. We spend a lot of time in Poland and Czechoslovakia and France. Sometime in Mexico and Canada. The focus in many countries is on demonstrations by students. Because I was also following along in the e-book, I have added many excerpts from the book.

I was strangely detached from many of the events of 1968. I was focused on Vietnam but was a married full-time college student With a small child and a practically full time job. I was pretty distracted by a daily life that was pretty demanding.


I am a sucker for books about the 60s and 70s so I had no way to ignore 1968: The Year that Rocked the World once I heard about it. It is another of those one dollar online used books. I can blame Goodreads for bringing it to my attention. Otherwise I might have died never having read this small jewel. It is special because it covers the 1968 political and social stirrings not only in the U.S. but internationally. It was a rebellious year in places other than the U.S. If you lived through this era, you will find much familiar but probably a few things that will be new to you. It does stray occasionally outside the immediate neighborhood of 1968 but almost always with some connection to our banner year.

You will thrill to on the spot coverage of the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago:

On Saturday night the demonstrators seemed particularly reluctant to leave Lincoln Park and chanted, “Revolution now!” and, “The park belongs to the people!” The police amassed their troops, and just as they seemed ready to attack, Allen Ginsberg mystically appeared and lead the demonstrators out of the park, loudly humming a single note: “Om.”
…
Sunday night the police started forcibly to clear Lincoln Park at 9:00. Abby Hoffman went up to them and in a mock scolding tone of voice, “Can’t you wait two hours? Where the hell’s the law and order in this town?” The police actually backed off until their posted 11:00 curfew.

But then the book covered the real police clubbing as well.

World events of 1968 are covered thoroughly as the title of the book promised: The Year that Rocked the World. We are taken to Poland, Paris, Prague and more. And although the book has some humor thanks to the Yippies, 1968 was a year of uprisings often led by students both here and around the world.

The government was violent. The police were violent. The times were violent and revolution was so close.

Radicals made the Bob Dylan line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” into the name of a group of bomb makers.

1968: The Year that Rocked the World captures the tenor of those times and distills it into 383 pages of remembrance and reflection. What were you doing in 1968?

In History it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.
…
The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia. Despite the thousands dead in Vietnam, the million starved in Biafra, the crushing of idealism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the massacre in Mexico, the clubbing and brutalization of dissenters all over the world, the murder of the two Americans who most offered the world hope, to many it was a year of great possibilities and it is missed. As Camus wrote in The Rebel, those who long for peaceful times are longing for “not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.” The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced. There were too many of them, and if they were given no other opportunity, they would stand in the street and shout about them. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense of where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.

I give 1968 four stars for that effort to give us hope again.

As the title suggests, this is a book about the year I graduated from high school and my first year in college. Surprisingly, I was unaware of the world events transpiring at the same time as the events in the U.S. that most effected my views evan today: civil rights unrest, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the student demonstrations. Kurlansky explains these events in more detail than I remember, but also talks about such events as the French student unrest, Praque Spring and the Russian invasion of Czechoslavakia (actually the same time as the Chicago Democrat Convention and the riots at that time), and the Mexican police brutality (and murder) to quell student unrest before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. It was a fascinating book. The author also wrote Salt and Cod, which never really sounded very interesting to me before. Now, I think I may read those two also.

The year 1968 was memorable for me personally. Coincidentally it was a remarkable year for the rest of the world as well. I was attracted to this book by the anticipation that it would provide a time capsule of an era when the baby boomer generation was young and crazy. It's sobering to realize that we are nearing the 50th anniversary of that fateful year.

In January of 1968 I graduated from college with my BS engineering degree which awarded me the necessary credentials to land a job qualifying me to receive an occupational deferment from the military draft. Also, on February 2, 1968 due to a string of unlikely coincidences I met the woman who five years eight months later became my wife. We're still happily married. Thus 1968 was for me the beginning of both my professional life and the relationship that evolved into my marital life.

The "draft" was front and center at that time for young men my age because, depending on one's lottery number, they were being sent to the Vietnam War. My occupational deferment needed to be renewed annually, and there was no assurance that it would be renewed. Thus it was an ominous threat haunting future plans.

Of course this book did not address my personal situation described above. It is focused on happenings such as the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Prague Spring, and the
1968 Summer Olympics with its notorious black power salute.

In 1968 it seemed as if every country in the world was having riots in the street. Regarding student demonstrations, Kurlansky didn't overdo Berkeley and Columbia at the expense of Paris, Warsaw or Mexico City. I had totally forgotten about the Tlatelolco massacre that happened in Mexico City shortly before the Olympics opened. It's possible that I didn't even know about it in 1968. Even today there is wide disparity in the estimates of the numbers of demonstrators killed. It was a time when all students felt that if they didn't protest something they would be missing out of doing the "in thing." Even students in high schools prepared their own "underground newspapers."

The gains and costs of the new ethic of mass demonstration are neatly illustrated by the U.S. presidential campaign. The antiwar demonstrations helped force the effective abdication of President Lyndon Johnson—which resulted in the election of the "silent majority" spokesman Richard Nixon. (An example of unintended consequences.)

Without shortchanging the roles of race and age, Kurlansky highlights the rise of television as a near-instantaneous conduit of news. There's a chapter on the rise of second wave feminism providing a compact but thorough review of that subject. The music scene—shift to psychedelic rock—and the drug scene—marijuana and LSD—are also recounted. In order to provide background and context to these various issues the book includes discussion of happenings in preceding and subsequent years, thus providing a fairly complete post-war history.

This took a lot longer than it should have to read, and I finally figured out why. The narrator of the audiobook was not the right person to narrate this. There is a distinct note of sarcasm/disgust for the subject matter that I thought at first was the author — who strives to have journalistic neutrality for most of it — but is in fact the narrator. It kind of ruined what would have been an excellent book for me.

Well-researched, well-written, gripping, world-wide in scope, and willing to engage honestly with issues of racism and oppression, the book delves into the electric year of 1968. I learned so much, and it illuminated a lot of the past 50 years for me. And sadly, so little has changed in 50 years. This year the world is in fire in similar ways to how it was in 1968. I hope for change but history indicates that this might not be a realistic hope.

A bit long but decent book on the 60s which the entire Zietgiest was encapsulated in 1968: Tet Offensive, Student Movement, Assasinations etc. Book also give a historical overview of sorts of how 'things' were changing when the 60s hit. References to events that took place in Europe as well. Better to do the audiobook as this is a long one.

50 years ago, the world faced one of the most tumultuous calendar years it ever faced. For most Americans, 1968 was a shocking a year as could be imagined, between the shock of the Vietnam War, the assassination of 2 of the most prominent political figures (MLK and RFK), a brutal free-for-all Democratic Convention, the violent race riots spurred by Dr. King's assassination, increased social upheaval and a sense that perhaps, for the first time, America was not facing a bright and prosperous future.

This work captures all of that, but is also reminds the world that 1968 was not just rough for the US. The uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Poland and France, the unrest in Mexico during the Olympics, the war in Vietnam, an under-reported genocide in Nigeria, the threat of war in the Middle East, and the shadow of nuclear holocaust between the USSR and the USA always lurking over the planet...this was not just a brutal year for America. Kurlansky takes a chronological approach, recounting many of the key events of that year from a global perspective. It is hard to get everything, and the analysis, while informative, does have a brief survey feel to it.

Still, for a one-volume work that tries to capture just how chaotic a year 1968 was, this would be a great starting point. From this work, if there were more specific events that you wanted to study further, you could count this as a springboard. However, it is important to understand the events of that year, as 1968 was one of those pivotal times in history, as we still continue to live with the impacts of that time. Worth the time to read, this year or in others.

Having loved both Salt and Cod, I am a bit disappointed with 1968. Too Boomerish, really, or better, too white and too male. He is at his best here in the chapters where he spoke to people involved and at his worst when relying too heavily on the New York Times. But he gives the impression that the noble, nonviolent civil rights movement was important mainly as a training ground for white SDSers and the women’s movement gets very little attention, and Black Power was a bad scene and the Black Panthers were no good (the only Panther book he lists in the bibliography is the grotesque distortion by Hugh Pearson) and not only does all that turn me off but then there are also these bits about the aftermath of the “Six Day War” that I also felt was a bit yucky in a Boomer way... the Poland chapter and the Prague Spring stuff was great. Then the Mexico chapter... which was why I wanted to read it in the first place, not knowing much about Mexico’s 68 and hoping for some global context... the Mexico chapter is this great opportunity for him to tell a story most English language readers don’t know, and he actually gets down there to talk to the now grown student radicals who survived... and that chapter was great but he writes that many people wouldn’t talk with him about it... still afraid of PRI thugs... and I am thinking, yeah, they don’t trust you, Mark...

One more thing: this book made me less interested in Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies so that might help me cull some titles from my ridiculous to-read list...

I was born in 1951, so reading this book was like looking at an old scrapbook and remembering what was. The author succeeds in expressing the violence of the time, the determination of young people to right the wrongs they saw in their world, and the tumult of that ghastly year. I remember feeling by year's end, with Nixon's election, that hope had not just died but been murdered, and that the country that I had loved as a child had revealed itself to be riven by fear, hatred, exploitation, and cynical political power. Anyone who thinks that today's polarized society and political culture is recent is wrong. It has a long history, at least as far back as the early 1960s, and by 1968, it was in full, ugly flower.

I rated the book three stars not because it's poor in any way but because it does not (perhaps cannot) deliver on the promise of the title since the scope is too vast for a mere 360 pages. The author tries valiantly and succeeds in several ways to give the flavor of the times, but the work reads more like a textbook for a survey of that year. Lots of information, but sometimes the reader loses the view of the forest for the trees. Still, for someone born after 1990 who wonders what 1968 was all about, this is a good introduction. The author takes a journalistic tone and ranges broadly across many areas of the world in that tumultuous year (college campuses in the U.S., France, West Germany, Japan, and Mexico, and struggles of people against what they viewed as oppression; e.g., Civil rights in the U.S., the war in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, the Paris revolt). In doing so he tries mostly successfully to draw links between the various upheavals, both in terms of goals and methods as well as wider questions of social consciousness. Thus it shows the older roots of the today's current wave of protest movements (Black Lives Matter, anti-globalization, environmental activism). For those who lived through this period, much will be quite familiar, yet Kurlansky still uncovers enough untold facts to satisfy the reader. Despite the 300+ pages, it is a rather quick yet worthwhile read. It's good to be reminded of where we came from, and that, in the words of the anti-colonial Mozambicans, "A luta continua, vitória é certa."

An engaging and comprehensive (political) history, but the sheer scope necessitates a sacrifice of nuance. To provide one example, Kurlansky’s account of the Clean-Ins suggests uncomplicated cooperation between the Diggers and the Yippies, et al, when most Digger literature—including Emmett Grogan’s autobiography—attest that this was not the case at all. (Grogan’s feelings toward Abbie Hoffman and his media circus mostly seesawed between exasperation and contempt.) Perhaps a minor oversight in the greater scheme of things, but nonetheless misleading and makes me wonder what other details may have slipped through the cracks.