cover image Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968

Year of the Heroic Guerrilla: World Revolution and Counterrevolution in 1968

Robert V. Daniels. Basic Books, $21.95 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-465-09286-4

Daniels takes an evenhanded look at the social upheavals experienced in the U.S., France, Czechoslovakia, China and other countries during the 1960s, highlighting 1968, the year that witnessed the Paris May Days, the Prague Spring and the turning point in China's Cultural Revolution. Turmoil in the U.S. that year included escalating protests against the war in Vietnam, outraged reactions to the King assassination and the most divisive presidential campaign since the Civil War. Daniels ( Russia ) finds common denominators in the widespread upheavals, arguing, for instance, that the target in each was the reactionary establishment and that the goal everywhere was ``equality of male and female, the old and the young, the teacher and the learner, the expert and the zealot.'' No goverments were toppled, and the rebellions all fell short of their most radical objectives but, as Daniels convincingly shows, each in its own way irreversibly changed national thinking and expectations. (Oct.)