Babak Fakhamzadeh
Kurlansky starts off by providing the four factors that contributed to 1968's flurry of revolts:
+ The example that was set in the early 1960s by the civil rights movement. + A generation that felt so different and alienated that it rejected all authority. + A war that was universally hated, providing a cause célèbre. + The emergence of yet-loosely controlled, and therefore much more raw and direct, television.
The book's interesting, but also feels a bit quaint. Focusing primarily on the U.S., with reasonable interest in Poland and Czechoslovakia and with a few sidesteps here and there, many of the stories are fascinating for the detail Kurlansky brings to them, but are also a tad obscure. Many of the leading roles were played by individuals that now have been all but completely lost to history. For example, I was very aware, growing up, of Jan Palace, the Czech student who immolated himself in Prague, protesting the Soviet-induced end of the Prague spring. But, in 1968, before Palach, Ronald W. Brazee did the same to himself in the US, after half a dozen or so had preceded him in the years prior.
There are clear parallels with the rampant dissatisfaction of a younger generation and the established order, then, and the more recent Occupy and Anonymous movements. Kurlansky's book, from 2004, predates these.
It's interesting Kurlansky puts the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union at the botched intervention in Prague in 1968. I'm now reading Charlie Wilson's War, where the author puts the end of the Soviet Union squarely on the shoulders on the American intervention, through the Mujahedin, in Afghanistan.
Kurlansky starts off by providing the four factors that contributed to 1968's flurry of revolts:
+ The example that was set in the early 1960s by the civil rights movement. + A generation that felt so different and alienated that it rejected all authority. + A war that was universally hated, providing a cause célèbre. + The emergence of yet-loosely controlled, and therefore much more raw and direct, television.
The book's interesting, but also feels a bit quaint. Focusing primarily on the U.S., with reasonable interest in Poland and Czechoslovakia and with a few sidesteps here and there, many of the stories are fascinating for the detail Kurlansky brings to them, but are also a tad obscure. Many of the leading roles were played by individuals that now have been all but completely lost to history. For example, I was very aware, growing up, of Jan Palace, the Czech student who immolated himself in Prague, protesting the Soviet-induced end of the Prague spring. But, in 1968, before Palach, Ronald W. Brazee did the same to himself in the US, after half a dozen or so had preceded him in the years prior.
There are clear parallels with the rampant dissatisfaction of a younger generation and the established order, then, and the more recent Occupy and Anonymous movements. Kurlansky's book, from 2004, predates these.
It's interesting Kurlansky puts the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union at the botched intervention in Prague in 1968. I'm now reading Charlie Wilson's War, where the author puts the end of the Soviet Union squarely on the shoulders on the American intervention, through the Mujahedin, in Afghanistan.