mark kurlansky 1968 the year that rocked the world

The impact was huge, not only on the antiwar movement, but also on the medium itself. 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. For the first time, Americans watched that day’s battle–the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive–on the evening news. 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. Kurlansky shows how the coming of live television made 1968 the first global year.

and the Miss America pageant was stormed by feminists carrying banners that introduced to the television-watching public the phrase “women’s liberation.” the Olympics were a disaster, with the Mexican government having massacred hundreds of students protesting police brutality there. the Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of the crown for drug use. both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale were forced to shut down by protesters.

In the Middle East, Yasir Arafat’s guerilla organization rose to prominence. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe.Įverything was disrupted. 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. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. 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.

Mark kurlansky 1968 the year that rocked the world