Certain years are so clogged with events so calamitous, so explosive, so ruinous, that both the years in question and the events which shaped them deserve closer scrutiny. Mr. Kurlansky has picked out 1968 as one of these years, arguing that no other year in living memory has been so thoroughly plagued by so many disasters both political and military. And though there's plenty of room to question Mr. Kurlansky's premise, the litany of incidents he explores here makes his both a strong and an entertaining case.
The Tet Offensive, the seizing of the USS Pueblo, the rise of student activism in the United States, the murder of Martin Luther King, the promising birth and crushing defeat of the Prague Spring, student protests in France nearly toppling their government... 1968 was afflicted, from stem to stern, with war, political oppression, and the death of hope. But while 1968 was an end to many things, it was the birth of many more. It liberalized college campuses, laid the groundwork for the protests that would help end the Soviet Union two decades later, created an entire generation of activists willing to challenge the status quo, and sparked the modernization of society into something freer and truer than the oppressive religiosity and patriotism which characterized the prior decades.
Mr. Kurlansky writes vividly of these events and the pain they brought, the blood they spilled, and the changes they spawned. But while his narrative is compelling, the case for the interconnectedness of these events leaves something to be desired. Mr. Kurlansky points to the newness of television and the universal opposition to the turbulent Vietnam War as spot fires from which 1968's various anti-authoritarian rebellions drew their fuel. But while a sense of burgeoning globalism and the overextension of American power may have provided inspiration for the various student protests, he fails to convince me that 1968 was any more apocalyptic than 1972, or 1945, or 1948, or 2001, or any of a dozen other years in which the impact of indirectly connected events sparked passionate and sometimes violent reactions. The more people we have living on the planet, the more events we have. And given that all humans operate from the same basic code, it's unremarkable to me that some of those events can cluster together to form an apocalyptic-seeming year like 1968.
But even if the grander explanation here fails to satisfy, 1968 remains a wonderful biography of a most tempestuous year. The events Mr. Kurlansky puts under the microscope are as riveting as they are disturbing. There's a lot here and it is presented with clarity and passion. (3/5 Stars)
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