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1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes
A review by Adrienne Miller
Mark Kurlansky cuts a wide swath in his very broad but engaging survey of one extraordinarily tumultuous year. Each of his topics could have (and have been) books in themselves: the My Lai Massacre, the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Muhammad Ali's draft evasion conviction, the Black Panthers, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the democratic convention in Chicago, the student uprisings across the world, the "Prague Spring" and the utterly Sun Kingish Charles de Gaulle, who rewrote his country's constitution to make the president of France the most powerful leader in any democracy. (I personally found the sections about the intrigue-laden de Gaulle administration to be some of the most entertaining bits in the book.) Kurlansky, the author of Cod and Salt, could have indeed indulged in a lot more "what a cool time it was" back-patting, but his tone throughout remains mercifully unhip and balanced. 1968 makes the argument, and persuasively so, that this was the year that got us, for better or worse, where we are today.
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