1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies
Written by Richard Vinen
Narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A major new history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale.
The year 1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary—around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications—terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968.
1968 is a striking and original attempt half a century later to show how these events, which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies which are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. 1968 pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that stemmed from 1968 and the brutal reaction that brought the era to an end.
Richard Vinen
Richard Vinen is a professor of history at King’s College London. He is the author of academic works, most recently National Service, 1945-1963, which won the 2015 Wolfson History Prize, as well as A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, The Unfree French, and Thatcher's Britain.
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Reviews for 1968
12 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My initial reaction upon actually starting this book (it having been on various TBR lists for awhile), was that I might be wasting my time. To me, the promise was in the subtitle, as I was wondering who in particular Vinen might be referring to in terms of "enemies." It turns out that said enemies were mostly just the authorities of the time, as they attempted to cope with the perceived emergency generated by the "street action" of students and labor unionist. Be that as it may, the chapters dealing with the United States, France, Britain and Germany are the real guts of this book, and they're quite good, in terms of providing an overview of what was motivating people to protest, and what they thought they were trying to accomplish. Perhaps the single most telling insight from Vinen is that if often seems that the various protestors had a stronger sense of what they were against, then what they were for, and I think that mentality has lasted to the current day. Less good are some of the thematic chapters, with the one dealing with the transition from protest, to actual violence of the "urban guerilla" variety being the single weakest. Still, I think this wound up being an effective survey, and if you read it in that spirit, I think one will get a lot out of it.