Something major happened in 1979, or around 1979, or in any case sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Orthodoxies crumbled, as did regimes, and the world was never the same. The centrality of the date is universally accepted, although no one can agree on when these changes began and when they were fully realized. In 2008 several historians organized a conference at Harvard University about the 1970s and eventually published an edited volume, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2011), which tried to tackle these questions from different disciplinary and geographical perspectives.
Christian Caryl's Strange Rebels is another attempt to grapple with these tremendous changes, but where Shock of the Global did so (inconclusively) by approaching the issue from different angles (and with different sets of questions), this book tries to put together a narrative involving four key personalities (Margaret...