The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968

by David Caute

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060158700
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Smithmark Pub
• Length: 514 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The 1968 student movements from an international perspective

David Caute's history of the 1968 student protest movements in the United States, Western Europe, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Mexico is a self-sufficient review of the events in question for readers whose memories do not extend back to 1968 and may know little about the student protests of the sixties and the issues involved. Even readers who remember the protests in the late sixties in the US and/or Britain will likely have something to learn from Caute's connection and comparison of those protests with more or less concurrent ones in other countries. Caute's most interesting observation (though not one that hasn't been made before) is that student protesters in Communist countries were demanding the bourgeois freedoms and privileges of the capitalist democracies, even as their counterpart young protesters in America, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan scorned those rights and idolized the Communist countries. Caute's style is effective and at times drily humorous. Clearly sympathetic to Leftist concerns, Caute is unsparing in laying bare the tactical and moral mistakes, radical posturing, confused goals and rhetoric, and other failings of the sixties Left. And he is fair but drily humorous in tracing the political devolution of such ex-radicals as Yippie-turned-stockbroker Jerry Rubin. David Caute was personally involved with the late-sixties student Left in both America and Britain, and perhaps the most distinguishing feature of this book- one of numerous ones written about its subject- is his first-hand observation of the Prague Spring and its aftermath, which he presents grippingly and in vivid detail. Besides this personal experience, the work appears to be more one of collation and review than of original research, but as a comparative international history this is appropriate. All in all, a worthy read for anyone interested in the events in question, whether they know much about them already or not.