1968 The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution ROBERT C. COTTRELL AND BLAINE T. BROWNE (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers)

Robert Cottrell and Blaine Browne's 1968: The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution, published on the 50th anniversary of the astonishing and often world-changing events it describes, is old-fashioned narrative history at its best: thoroughly researched, lucid, penetrating, filled with vividly drawn characters and dramatic scenes, but avoiding sentimentalism and romanticism. It's the perfect book for baby boomer parents and grandparents to give their millennial offspring to make help them sense of the events that shaped a generation.

“The year 1968 has been written about many times before, but no one has covered it as comprehensively and as thoroughly as Robert C. Cottrell and Blaine T. Browne. Their narrative offers almost all of the key players, including Dr. Spock, Dr. King, Malcolm X and George Wallace, as well as the young activists and protesters who belonged to SDS, the IRA, the Yippies, and the Black Panthers. The feminist movement is here and gay liberation, too, along with the key places, nationally and internationally, where revolution broke out: Prague, Berlin, Chicago and San Francisco. 1968: The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution looks back at the 1950s and ahead to the present day. It arrives in the nick of time for the 50th anniversary of the year that rocked the world.”

The year 1968 retains its mythic hold on the imagination in America and around the world. Like the revolutionary years 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, and 1989, it is recalled most of all as a year when revolution beckoned or threatened. On the 50thanniversary of that tumultuous year, cultural historians Robert Cottrell and Blaine T. Browne provide a well-informed, up-to-date synthesis of the events that rocked the world, emphasizing the revolutionary possibilities more fully than previous books. For a time, it seemed as if anything were possible, that utopian visions could be borne out in the political, cultural, racial, or gender spheres. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, the Resistance, the Ultra-Resistance, the New Politics, Chavez and RFK breaking bread, LBJ’s withdrawal, student revolt, barricades in Paris, the Prague Spring, SDS’ sharp turn leftward, communes, the American Indian Movement, the Beatles’ “Revolution,” the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” The Population Bomb, protest at the Miss America pageant, and Black Power at the Mexico City Olympics. 1968 was also the year of My Lai, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Warsaw Pact tanks in Czechoslovakia, the police riot in Chicago, the Tlatelolco massacre, Reagan’s belated bid, Wallace’s American Independent Party campaign, “Love It or Leave It,” and the backlash that set the stage, at year’s end, for Richard Milhous Nixon’s ascendancy to the White House. For those readers reliving 1968 or exploring it for the first time, Cottrell and Browne serve as insightful guides, weaving the events together into a powerful narrative of an America and a world on the brink