In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history. With1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the birth of the women s movement, and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe. Everything was disrupted. In the Middle East, Yasir Arafat s guerilla organization rose to prominence . . . both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale were forced to shut down by protesters . . . the Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of the crown for drug use . . . the Olympics were a disaster, with the Mexican government having massacred hundreds of students protesting police brutality there . . . and the Miss America pageant was stormed by feminists carrying banners that introduced to the television-watching public the phrase women s liberation. Kurlansky shows how the coming of live television made 1968 the first global year. It was the year that an amazed world watched the first live telecast from outer space, and that TV news expanded to half an hour. For the first time, Americans watched that day s battle the Vietnam War s Tet Offensive on the evening news. Television also shocked the world with seventeen minutes of police clubbing demonstrators at the Chicago convention, live film of unarmed students facing Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, and a war of starvation in Biafra. The impact was huge, not only on the antiwar movement, but also on the medium itself. The fact that one now needed television to make things happen was a cultural revelation with enormous consequences. In many ways, this momentous year led us to where we are today. Whether through youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media, Mark Kurlansky shows how, in1968,twelve volatile months transformed who we are as a people. But above all, he gives a new understanding to the underlying causes of the unique historical phenomenon that was the year 1968. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written full of telling anecdotes, penetrating analysis, and the author s trademark incisive wit 1968is the most important book yet of Kurlansky s noteworthy career. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

By any measure, it was a remarkable year. Mentioning the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the Prague Spring and its backlash gives only the merest impression of how eventful and transformative the year must have felt at the time. As Kurlansky (Cod, Salt, etc.) has made the phrase "changed the world" a necessary component of subtitles for books about mundane objects, his choice to focus on a year that so "rocked" the world is appropriate. To read this book is to be transported to a very specific past at once more naive and more mature than today; as Kurlansky puts it, it was a time of "shocking modernism" and "quaint innocence," a combination less contradictory than it first appears. The common genesis of demonstrations occurring in virtually every Western nation was the war in Vietnam. Without shortchanging the roles of race and age, Kurlansky shrewdly emphasizes the rise of television as a near-instantaneous (and less packaged than today) conduit of news as key to the year's unfolding. To his credit, Kurlansky does not overdo Berkeley at the expense of Paris or Warsaw or Mexico City. The gains and costs of the new ethic of mass demonstration are neatly illustrated by the U.S. presidential campaign: the young leftists helped force the effective abdication of President Lyndon Johnson-and were rewarded with "silent majority" spokesman Richard Nixon. 1968 is a thorough and loving (perhaps a bit too loving of the boomer generation) tapestry-or time capsule. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

"The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia," says Kurlansky (Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History) in this appraisal of many unrelated worldwide protests that occurred that year. Unlike Jules Witcover in The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America and Lewis Gould in 1968: The Election that Changed America, Kurlansky devotes little attention to the presidential election, focusing instead on protests in Czechoslovakia, France, and Mexico, as well as those in a number of South American and European countries. The book includes fascinating stories about prominent movement leaders, notably Czech Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcvaek and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the French student movement. Kurlansky concludes that 1968 was unique because of a convergence of the disdain for the Vietnam War throughout the world, a widespread mood of alienation among youth, the success of the Civil Rights Movement, and improvements in the media that brought visuals of world events into homes. Strongly recommended for most public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/03.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

This often riveting tale captures the zeitgeist of an epochal year in modern history in its examination of worldwide events, ranging from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam to the election of Richard Nixon as president of the US. Particularly revealing are accounts of the mounting unrest in France that threatened Charles DeGaulle's regime and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, where attempts unfolded to democratize communism, or bring about "socialism with a human face." Kurlansky tellingly relates the mass bloodletting that Mexico experienced shortly before hosting the 1968 Olympic Games and the emergence of a new generation in Poland willing to challenge cultural, social, and political constraints. The author offers intriguing biographical accounts of radical activists, including Columbia University's Mark Rudd, Poland's Adam Michnik, Germany's Rudi Dutschke, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, another German national, who was studying in France. Many of the year's young radicals, including these four, were Jews committed to social action and willing to challenge government policies they viewed as intolerant, inhumane, or imperialistic. The book contains additional important observations regarding the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the Cuban Revolution. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General readers and above. R. C. Cottrell California State University, Chico From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Mark Kurlansky is the author of The Basque History of the World, the New York Times bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (among the New York Public Library's Best Books of the Year in 1998), as well as A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry; A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny, and several acclaimed works of short fiction and journalism about the Caribbean. He spent seven years as the Caribbean correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

He lives in New York City. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.