This work looks at the revolutionary events of 1968, a year in which many countries across the world were facing crises. These included: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr; student revolts at Columbia University; the May uprising in France; and China's "cultural revolution".

From Paris to Peking, Saigon to Washington, the pillars of the postwar world tottered on the brink of collapese in 1968. "Year of the Heroic Guerrilla" is a global analysis of that universal upheaval. Daniels depicts the great crises of that era: the Tet offensive and the abdication of Lyndon Johnson; the denouncement of the counterculture; the fissuring of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the student revolt at Columbia Unviersity; the May uprising in France that nearly overthrew the Fifth Republic; the "cultural revolution" in China; the chilling of the Prague Spring by the Soviet army; and, finally, the convention and riots in Mayor Daley's Chicago, signalling the downturn of the revolutionary spirit in America.