1968: The Year That Rocked the World
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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 naïve 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.)
end quote from:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-345-45581-9
In 1968 I was 20 years old. I bought myself a brand new 1968 Camaro. I didn't go or die in Viet Nam because 5 years before this I had recovered from Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy. So, what had almost killed me also saved my young life. So, instead of going to Viet Nam like a lot of my friends did who didn't run away to Canada to avoid the draft, I stayed and worked with Computers in North Hollywood near Glendale where my parents lived then. By 1969 my parents had moved to San Diego. So, obviously in 1969 my life changed a lot then when I moved to Venice, California because of a job there. 3 months there I decided to go to San Diego and go back to college again because I realized I didn't want to be a computer programmer or operator the rest of my life. 1969 was even crazier than 1968 but I hadn't been an adult before so I really didn't understand how bad it was at the time. I just thought the craziness was normal.
But, 1969 turned my life completely upside down to the point where I was no longer the same person I was growing up. I saw too much to ever go back to childhood once again.
College, the people I met, the world was changing and in many ways I was lost until I got married and had a son in 1974. Though I then had two more years of college under my belt and had studied psychology and philosophy and sociology and understood myself and the world better, the problem was the whole world had gone completely insane in 1965 to 1975. It would never ever be the same again.
end quote from:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-345-45581-9
In 1968 I was 20 years old. I bought myself a brand new 1968 Camaro. I didn't go or die in Viet Nam because 5 years before this I had recovered from Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy. So, what had almost killed me also saved my young life. So, instead of going to Viet Nam like a lot of my friends did who didn't run away to Canada to avoid the draft, I stayed and worked with Computers in North Hollywood near Glendale where my parents lived then. By 1969 my parents had moved to San Diego. So, obviously in 1969 my life changed a lot then when I moved to Venice, California because of a job there. 3 months there I decided to go to San Diego and go back to college again because I realized I didn't want to be a computer programmer or operator the rest of my life. 1969 was even crazier than 1968 but I hadn't been an adult before so I really didn't understand how bad it was at the time. I just thought the craziness was normal.
But, 1969 turned my life completely upside down to the point where I was no longer the same person I was growing up. I saw too much to ever go back to childhood once again.
College, the people I met, the world was changing and in many ways I was lost until I got married and had a son in 1974. Though I then had two more years of college under my belt and had studied psychology and philosophy and sociology and understood myself and the world better, the problem was the whole world had gone completely insane in 1965 to 1975. It would never ever be the same again.
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