All Around Me - 1968 The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution

It was like going to see the movie Harvard Beats Yale 14-14, that was my similar motive to read 1968 …. just to make sure there was no reference to me or anyone I knew in it.  When you're a junior in college, too young to appreciate that something absolutely terrible would happen weekly, if not daily, 1968 did not seem that atypical.  I still think the book I read on Paris 1848 showed a time when insurrection encompassed the majority of the populace, not the would-be revolutionaries and radical-chic.

The anger stemmed from the Viet Nam war, in that I heartedly agree.  I remember screaming my first foulest oath at one of my suite-mates whose father was a general.  Most of the young men I knew from the Ivies were, if not draft dodgers, consumed with figuring out how to keep getting A's in their majors to avoid getting an A-I report to duty letter.  I honestly can't remember any of my immediate friends getting inducted.  But other school-mates did become more radical to the point when I was sure I heard a wire tape when I answered a phone call from someone I knew well involved in a college office take-over.

Cottrell and Browne link women's liberation, the birth of gay rights, Indian occupations, Black Power all to the spirit that flamed over the use of Napalm.  Did I feel like a second class human being because of my gender?  Hell no.  That's the primary reason I went to an all-girl college, so I wouldn't have to put up with male bravado in the classroom and sense of entitlement for academic laurels.  Mixers, football games and long weekends were enough of the male sex.  My school also struggled with integrating.  They purposively recruited minority students from NYC.  There were so few of them that they banded together, eating at the same table in the cafeteria and never going solo into a classroom.

Enough of a stroll down my personal memory lane … this book is okay.  It's layout alone conveys a crammed cycle of critical events in its font size and margins.  One looks at the page and wonders how you can read through all the information.  It makes the book overwhelming and tiresome.  The authors can't help themselves but attribute the election of Obama to the seeds of 1968.  If so, they ought to have acknowledged that after a Democratic, the electorate picked Nixon, a rebalancing of public opinion from the panic of extremes.

Doing my own adjustment, I moved on to read a collection of Americans devoted to the federal Constitution … stay tuned.