VLVL2, related- "You Had to Be There"

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

(Sorry if this has been posted before.)

>From "You Had to be There,"  Robin Blackburn's review in The Nation 
of Mark Kurlansky's new book _1968: The Year that Rocked the World_



"Old soldiers, they say, don't die, they just fade away. For some 
reason 1968 hasn't died, nor has it faded away. As Mark Kurlansky's 
book testifies, it is still with us, alive and kicking. Surely we don't 
need yet another book on the événements? Leftists and radicals 
can be encouraged that the writer of a best-seller, Cod: A Biography 
of the Fish That Changed the World, sees an audience for a new 
book on 1968. Unlike the last spate of books, which appeared in 
1998, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World doesn't even mark 
an obvious anniversary. The fondness of publishers for such works
 comes, no doubt, from the power of demographics--1968 being 
the baptism of the first wave of baby boomers--and of their own 
memories. Sixties glamour can still make converts in surprising 
places--for instance, the authorities at Columbia University, who, 
in a film celebrating the institution's 250th anniversary, proudly 
cited its 1960s rebellions, so much deplored at the time, as one more
proof that Columbia leads the way. 

"An attempt at objectivity on the subject of 1968 would be dishonest," 
writes Kurlansky, who was twenty that year, "of the generation that 
hated the Vietnam War, protested against it, and has a vision of authority 
shaped by the memory of the peppery taste of tear gas." He uses press 
reports, memoirs and interviews to put together a story that works its 
way through the calendar, from January to December, by way of demos, 
general strikes, insurrections, assassinations, manifestos and mass 
resistance, ranging from Saigon to Chicago, Paris to Prague, Berlin to 
Mexico City. By the end, the old order has been shaken but is still very 
much in place. Yet a new sensibility is evident and a new perspective 
glimpsed. "

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040209&c=1&s=blackburn

respectfully