Ok, boomer.
Dec 03 2019
1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/03/1968-the-year-that-rocked-the-world-by-mark-kurlansky/
Dec 03 2019
Ok, boomer.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/03/1968-the-year-that-rocked-the-world-by-mark-kurlansky/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
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That’s it?
I loled.
Seriously, tho, I had to mightily restrain myself from saying a well-deserved “ok boomer” to my father-in-law over the holidays. He had the temerity, after scoffing at me telling him that women were enfranchised in America decades after black men, to tell me, “Read a book.”
Me! To read a book! The gall of some folk.
Author
I’m glad you lol’d!
Your father-in-law doesn’t know you very well, does he?
Author
Yep. That’s it. I skimmed a lot.
All right, that’s not entirely fair and it is a deliberate provocation. The chapter on the repression of the Prague Spring was better than I expected. The set of negotiations when the Politburo came en masse to the border and crossed back to Soviet Ukraine every night? My better half knows the woman who translated Brezhnev’s tirade. Kurlansky handles that episode well. I learned a bit from the chapter on Mexico City. The Poland chapters are also pretty good, except they minimize Poland’s ’56 and the whole discussion of rebellion against communism overlooks one of the largest, East Germany in ’53. (I also met Jacek Kuron ever so briefly, and Adam Michnik is probably a friend-of-a-friend somewhere along the line.)
But the whole framing is totally Ok Boomer, which I found tiresome, and Kurlansky does more telling when he should do more showing. Since so much of the book was not really new to me, I found myself going “yeah yeah yeah” and leafing through the pages at speed. Which mainly suggests that I am not this book’s audience.
Also? Hey boomer guy, our revolutions succeeded. Yours truly, Gen X