"Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of D'tente" by Jeremi Suri

This scholarly study of the global protest movements in the 1960s and their concomitant effect on governmental policy in the following era of detente weaves a grand theory regarding the influence of social unrest on the wielding of public power. According to Suri's "international history," the rise in student and worker discontent in the Cold War era-as exemplified not only in the demonstrations of Europe, America, Mexico and the Soviet Union, but in the Cultural Revolution in China as well-prompted leaders of all nations to isolate the realm of political power from the hands of the public. In a sense stripping the world theater of its ideological differences, Suri, a Univ. of Wisconsin assistant professor, finds similarity among leaders such as Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong as they fight insurgent forces at home and come to depend on a balance of power among nations to maintain their loosening grips on control. D'tente "was a convergent response to disorder among the great powers," Suri argues, established to counteract a global "language of dissent" that threatened to topple the world's institutions. Suri's thesis links many events and personalities during a time of great change, and succeeds in "connecting the world of politics and diplomacy with social and cultural experiences" and mapping a global history of the decade.