1968: Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change; ed. by Marc Aronson (review)

Fourteen essays, interspersed with Elizabeth Partridge's "Nightly News" commentaries, examine events above and below the fold of a most newsworthy year, 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy necessarily loom large, from Kekla Magoon's long-view analysis in "The Death of the Dream" to Mark Kurlansky's up-close remembrances in "Robert F. Kennedy," but it's the less frequently told stories that set this volume apart. Susan Bartoletti's lively, resonant take on the protest theatrics of Abbie Hoffman along with David Lubar's thoughtful overview of the state of stand-up comedy offer perspective on the place of humor, satire, and the absurd in the media. Reminding readers that 1968 was lived worldwide, Lenore Look discusses how her attempts to interview Red Guard members from the China's Cultural Revolution met a stony wall of silence; Mark Kurlansky revisits efforts at Communist reform during the Prague Spring; Omar Figueras discusses lethal repression of student protesters in Mexico City's run-up to the Olympics. Closing essays by Loree Griffin Burns and Marc Aronson on science and technology suggest that events that made lasting difference in our lives—cracking open the genetic code, and previewing the interfaces that would make personal computing a reality—flashed through the news with little public notice ("What are we not noticing now that may be the seed of the future?"). Individual contributor notes, source notes, and an index are included. EB