A pivotal year for social change: so much happened in 1968, Mark Kurlansky makes good use his "quirky verve" to write a narrative history.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World. by Mark Kurlansky Ballantine Books, January 2004 $26.95, ISBN 0-345-45581-9

It was a year of assassination and healing, repression and revolt, nonviolence and militancy, and war without peace. Mark Kurlansky, approaches the task of bringing thematic cohesion to the year 1968 frenetically. The book 1968 reads like a newscast written by an espresso addict. The book zips through the year, covering the antiwar movement, student demonstrations, feminist protests and street riots, with liberal quantities of art, culture and social trends tossed in. It skips from campus to campus, from SDS to SNCC, to the Chicago Democratic National Convention and from Cuba to Haiti to Prague.

The parade of characters includes Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, Mark Rudd, the Beatles, Rod McKuen, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Chisholm, Eartha Kitt, Fidel Castro, the Kerner Commission and, of course, Orenthal James Simpson.

Kurlansky reminds readers that O.J. kicked off the year by scoring two touchdowns on January 1, as Southern California defeated Indiana before a record-breaking Rose Bowl crowd of 102,946. Three days later poet-play wright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was sentenced to prison in New Jersey for illegal gun possession in the previous year's Newark riots. Also in January, one of the most talked-about moments of the year occurred at a White House ladies luncheon. A young, outspoken Eartha Kitt stunned Lady Bird Johnson and an assortment of society women with an outburst against the Vietnam War.

The assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy are far from the highlights of the book. The book 1968 is more about what readers may not know or have forgotten than it is about what they know and remember. For example, there is a reminder that Robert Kennedy "worshiped warfare" and authorized wiretaps on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because he feared King had Communist ties. Kurlansky muses, "How did [Robert Kennedy] become a hero of the sixties generation and the New Left?"

Even some of the most avid students of the '50s and '60s generation may have overlooked LeRoi Jones's transformation from Beat to black. In the late '50s, Jones had founded a poetry magazine with Beat icon Allen Ginsberg. Both writers traveled separately to Cuba in the '60s on Castro-sponsored trips. Out of the experience, Jones penned his introspective Cuba Libre, which criticized Beat figures as "merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics." This from the firebrand cultural revolutionary.

And who recalls that Wall Street participated in the antiwar movement? Kurlansky notes that in 1968 the brokerage house Paine Webber, Jackson and Curtis ran full-page newspaper ads explaining why peace was "the most bullish thing that could happen to the stock market."

The King assassination and subsequent riots are summed up in 10 lines. And while the white student movement receives extensive and detailed coverage in the book, little attention is given to black students, except those who staged their own protests on predominantly white campuses.

Despite its omissions and the short shrift afforded some major occurrences and individuals, 1968 is a credible work that offers entertaining insight into what was arguably the most important year of the 20th century.

Pearl Stewart, a former journalist, teaches at Florida A&M University.