1968: The Year That Rocked the World [Hardcover]

Mark Kurlansky has set himself the task of writing the history of 1968, a year of rock n roll n rebellions. Much of the focus of the book is on the student movements that erupted across the world, principally in France, the United States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mexico and Germany, though Kurlansky still finds room to deal with the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in Biafra, as well as topics such as feminism, and the popular philosophy and literature of the era.

Kurlansky writes in a crisp readable prose, the sections that cover the student movements in the various countries appear to have been covered in a reasonably impartial and thorough manner, though the focus on student movements does seem to be a little overdone for a book that claims to be a history of the whole year. The perversity of this is quite clear when one considers that the actuality of the Vietnam War receives far less coverage than the anti-war movement in the United States and such coverage as there is gives little idea of the reality of that war. The troubles in Northern Ireland receive zero coverage, as does South Africa. Latin American, African, and Asian (the cultural revolution in China is graced with a few paragraphs) coverage is primarily focussed on a single country in each continent: Mexico, Biafra and Vietnam. And then there is the big problem I had with this book . . .

Ever seen the The Big Lebowski? In that brilliant film by the brothers Coen there is a character called Walter, the Big Lebowski's bowling buddy. No matter what the subject under discussion is, Walter manages to bring it back to the issue of `Nam. Kurlansky's `Nam is Zionism and Israel.

Firstly there appears to be a problem with emphasis, for example there are well over twenty mentions (often of multiple pages) in the index for Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Judaism. In way of comparison the total for Muslims, Islam and Arabs is zero. That problem of emphasis is a relatively minor one in comparison to the out-right lying and propaganda that serves for Kurlansky's coverage of the Middle East. For him Palestinians don't exist as a people, except as terrorists; anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are synonyms; Israel offered back the land it invaded and occupied in 1967 in return for peace; the Israeli government had nothing to do with the settlement of the occupied territories, etcetera, etc. And Kurlansky's source for all this wisdom? In the bibliography section we have one book covering the Middle East, Michael Oren's Six Days of War. Who is Michael Oren? Currently he is Likud prime minister Netenyahu's man in Washington. The only other "scholar" mentioned is the intensely partisan Zionist Walter Laquer.

Without Kurlansky's nonsense on Israel and Zionism this would be a reasonable book on the Student movements of 1968; not a deep or profound book on that year, but rather on the level of a good television documentary series. With the nonsense, the book is a disgrace and certainly doesn't deserve the back page blurb from Uncut magazine ("combining the rigour of a historian"). To put it mildly, "1968: The year that rocked the world", was a disappointing read.

A whole book just about 1968 - what a brilliant idea! And thanks to Mark Kurlansky's effortless prose, this is not only a fascinating book but also an enjoyable one.

'1968' is a broad overview of the major events of the year, including the Tet offensive, the assasination of Robert Kennedy, the Prague Spring, Biafra and the growing black power movemnet. Kurlansky is particularly interested in the growing disaffection of the young on both sides of the Iron curtain and gives a vivid portrayal of the student riots that took place in cities across Europe and the Americas.

I was particularly struck by an account of the Democrat Party convention in Chicago, during which the local police lost control of themsleves and started beating innocent people and smashing cars. As Kurlansky points out, this wasn't the first time something like this had happened, but in 1968 there were now television cameras, recording everything for posterity.

Easy to read, this book is nevertheless scholarly and well-researched. I can't recommend it hughly enough.

For me the book lacked precisely what the subject should have been about: imagination. Its focus is mainly on politics (the emergence of a radical politics); especially American politics. And yet the political is, like Moses, a guide destined never to experience the true wonder of '68, which was more anti-politics and anarchist than commentators such as Kurlansky tend to acknowledge. After all, we only have to look around us to see what happened when the sixty-eighters themselves came to power and became, what, New Labour? There is a quote in one of the chapters that when the '68 generation became thirty years old, it was at least certain that they would not be working in advertising. Au contraire, mon ami. They turned out to be one of the most media-friendly (and savvy and manipulative) generations of them all.

The book is a compendium of the key historico-political movements of the time; and for this reader a very dry read because of that. The true spirit of '68, however, lies elsewhere; in May in Paris (to which only one short chapter, seemingly star-struck by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and informative about little else, is devoted). It is for example surprising that in a book of almost 400 pages there is no mention made of Guy Debord. But that defines the approach taken; an attention to the details of historical sequence and personalities, with little time left for discussion of ideas and the winged flight of the imagination, and its refusal to land, unless life itself changes. Call it romantic, idealist, naive, surreal, whatever; the spirit of 1968 would admit to all of those and much more. But this refusal to conform and to be categorized is still the only thing which has endured, and will continue to endure, from that annus mirabilis, long after the history and the politics have faded from memory, or been romanticized and consumer-packaged out of all recognition, which amounts to much the same thing.