Customer Reviews

Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

There were parts of the book that I really liked. Her writing is very good and her research regarding those times was well based. I too grew up at that time and was in the same circles to a much much lessor extent than she. There were no experiences easily available at that time to teach us how to even understand A revolution happened regarding class, women,and more particularly racism during the 60s and early 70s. That does not even include music, dance, art, the economy, etc. We were all being educated extensively, intellectually and by new experiences, and more importantly including some real effective organizing skills. We had more money and resources in a way our parents never had available when they were our age. What we did with those opportunities resulted in some significant change. I had hoped that Cathy would talk about her experiences with this revolution in a more personal way. I think she did an excellent job explaining how and why she intellectually made the decisions she made. That was good and helpful, but I still don't know much about Cathy and how she experienced this meaningful time based on her own experience as an upper middle class person whose whole understanding of the world was turned upside down by the efforts to affect power in this country. I do recommend this book, but don't expect to know Cathy Wilkerson much better than what we already knew. Her place in the weatherman organization is confirmed and understanding how decisions were made becomes very clear. That information clearly helps us understand the Weathermen and what influnced their activity.

Flying Close to the Sun was an interesting look at how SDS and other anti-war activists decided that confrontation, even violent confrontation was the only true way to exact meaningful politcal change. It also showed that many new leftists were anti-Vietnam war but not anti-war. I am sure many would be all too comfortable in the culture wars of today.

Ms. Wilkerson comes across as a person with strong beliefs and a true committment to back them up with action. Yet, she also comes across as self-absorbed and naive. She didn't seem concerned that her father's town house had been destroyed and that other innocent people could have been killed. She acknowledged that her cohorts had shown terrible judgement in messing with explosives but didn't seem to realize the town house explosian damaged the anti-war movement and helped move this country to the right.

The book was still a great read and did a nice job of describing the political climate of the late sixties. It showed, through her own strainted family relations, the dynamics of what was then labeled as the "generation gap." Yet, at times I thought the book wasn't reflective enough even though it looked back events almost 40 years old.

Cathy Wilkerson is best known to the world today as one of the two survivors of the March 2, 1970 bomb explosion at a Weatherman safe house in New York City which killed three of her friends and collaborators.

Wilkerson writes an interesting narrative of her transformations from a WASPy 1950's era Swarthmore College grad into a professional activist to a street fighter, then a terrorist, a wanted fugitive, a mother, a prison inmate, and today a NYC math teacher. Wilkerson gives the most emphasis in her book to the first three, and it is an emphasis that will probably be of most interest to readers.

Wilkerson notes throughout her book that the New Left had a tendency toward bullying tactics for both organizational governance and in formulating programs of action [p.205]. This tenancy was extreme in the case of SDS in general and the Weathermen in particular. To wit: "It was a [leadership] style that embraced certainty as a primary credential for leadership." Wilkerson detects this tendency but never struggles against it and never says why, either. This is a issue I would have liked to see her address.

Another issue that Wilkerson identifies but never addresses in depth is the whole idea of SDS as an organization for the long-run. As a student-based organization SDS had the fatal flaw that being a college student is a transitory phase in most people's lives. At some point people want to stop going to classes and get on with their lives. So where does the committed student activist go then? [p.236]

The Weathermen were an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, one of the 1960s' most active anti-war groups. But the Weathermen differed with their radical counterparts in calling for revolution against the United States immediately -- first, because political conditions, they felt, were right, and second, to draw police attention off the Black Panther Party and African-American organizers. The Weathermen waged a largely successful guerrilla campaign in the United States,

Author Wilkerson was intimately involved in the Weathermen. She eventually served prison time for crimes committed during that period, after coming out of hiding in 1980 and turning herself in. Wilkerson's life, activism and the tumultuous period in which the Weathermen operated are the subjects of this book.

Wilkerson writes about her personal growth, political contradictions and struggle to find a place in a revolutionary movement that was largely male dominated and filled with its own contradictions. Inside herself, Wilkerson fights feelings of guilt over her well-off status, and questions the rhetoric of the Weathermen in comparison to the practices she sees in the organization. Many of its members, though intelligent and psychologically strong, were involved in activities most people would never experience, and all often faced varied political, moral and ethical questions, which Wilkerson discusses candidly. This text contains her firsthand account of the 1970 Greenwich Village explosion that catapulted the Weathermen into the national spotlight. In addition, this is one of the few books on the Weathermen in which the author so forwardly addresses the status of men in power and the position of women in the group. At times, Wilkerson's recollections are less than flattering, Yet, it is these stories, and the other tales told as part of a one-of-a-kind life journey, that make this text worth reading.

Cathy Wilkerson gives a thoughtful memoir of her life in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Weather Underground. She also provides enough personal background to explain how she became involved in US radical politics in the 1960s. Her final chapter Reentry gives a brief summary of her life afterwards.

Wilkerson is famous for being one of the two people to survive the 1970 explosion of the Greenwich Village townhouse where a bomb was being assembled. This incident is described in chapter 10 of the book.

She is careful not to discuss the motivations or actions of others in the movement which, while understandable, gives a certain limitation to her story. Yet as the reflections of an American radical this is an excellent book, providing insight into her personality, the movement, and the events of the time. What stands out clearest in this writing is the support that Wilkerson and the Weather Underground wanted to show for the Black Panthers in the fight against Racism in the United States. The hardest part for readers to understand today may be the Maoist/Leninist revolutionary tactics that were the signature belief of this faction of the radical left.

In the opening pages of the book Wilkerson quotes Carl Sandburg:

"You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?"

So many books about the Sixties and so few have the depth of the personal, along with a clear understanding of the political. Cathy's humanity constantly asserts itself as she weaves her experiences in this fascinating book. She shows herself to be an excellent writer. A difficult book to put down... Even if one doesn't agree with all facets of her analysis, it would be almost impossible not to be moved to consider very carefully all of her criticisms and observations. Anyone who reads this book will become wiser about the complexities inherent in attempting to solve social problems.

So disappointing. So unrevealing. Written as if under a heavy sheet of asbestos-- that is, self-censorship. After all these years? Oh, come on! The only spark of independence shown by Ms. Wilkerson is her spirited defense of Terry Robbins, her sometime lover, who was mightily dumped on for Weatherman's "military error" in Bill Ayers's pathetic, self-serving book. For an honest account of the female experience in this troubled time when the white, middle-class New Left imploded, try Susan Stern, "With the Weathermen," and Jane Alpert, "Growing Up Underground."

This is a recounting of the author's experiences in various movement groups, mostly SDS and Weatherman. Along the way of fighting against the war and the military industrial complex, she struggles with inter-movement issues of gender equality, the relations between white and black movement groups and a perpetual lack of an end-game plan for change by the various organizations. It is worth reading due to Wilkerson's unique perspective and her openness about her thoughts, hopes and reasoning during the events of the '60s and '70s as recalled much later.

It is most of the way through the book when we get to the beginnings of Weatherman. Prior to that, Wilkerson describes successfully working for a congressman, organizing students in D.C. and elsewhere, publishing the SDS paper and meeting Vietnamese officials on a trip that supposed to end in Hanoi but couldn't due to increased U.S. bombing. It is clear that Wilkerson, at least as she looks back now, is frustrated by the lack of a plan. After rushing the steps of the Pentagon with SDS and others, she asks, "What good were we doing sitting out here, chanting against those impenetrable stone walls? We were hippies, students, and angry young people without a strategy." Later, as Weatherman leadership restricts information and membership in the newly organized, cultish collectives, Wilkerson is frustrated by the fact that "...Weatherman, for all its eloquent economic and political analysis, didn't have much of a strategy for moving beyond the immediate actions."

Wilkerson is among the first to go underground as she and the other survivor climb out of the burning rubble of her father's townhouse after the explosion. Unable to go out into the public for security reasons and depressed over the loss of her comrades and her lover, she spends more than a few years in relative isolation, close enough to the leadership of the Weather Underground to occasionally assist and to be protected but outside the top circle and left out of the loop.

This recounting almost totally lacks the intrigue and voyeurism of other accounts by the leaders of the Weather Underground. Wilkerson writes openly about the decisions that were made, the struggles that she and others faced, and the war and other events of the day that led them to take the steps they took. She seems never to be comfortable with the cult-like, controlled atmosphere of the collectives. This telling of the Weather Underground story from the perspective of a member who was there for everything (for longer than most of the eventual leaders) but remained outside the inner circle, takes all of the romance out of the story. This provides a good counterpoint to the video documentaries and other published books.

Wilkerson remains proud of doing the best that she could find to do based on what she believed about the ongoing injustices. Even the townhouse explosion, she says, finally allowed "the intensity of [their] anger" to be "heard throughout the country" (it also provided focus for the organization and drastically improved their strategy in the future). In the end, she wouldn't have stood idly by, stating that while she did not, in the book, shy "away from exploring the weaknesses of SDS and the Weather Underground, then, like now, the gravest mistake is inaction."

I was part of the SDS in the 1960s. I too went with the Weather Faction and considered myself Weatherman from the Conference in Chicago until after Townhouse. I still think of before and after Townhouse.

Many of the reviews of Weather memoirs talk about the violence committed by Weather, yet there was far more violence committed by the right wing from the civil rights worker murders through the killing of the Panthers.

Cathy's book is a rarity. Most of what is written of this period is through the eyes of the male participants. Their books so often relegate women to invisibility. This book helps rectify some of that erasing of women from movement history.

It has been trendy to retroactively apply the term terrorist to Weather, yet most of the violence was directed towards property rather than people.

If you want to know about the endless internecine conflicts in SDS, you'll find lots to absorb you here. If you're looking for an account that captures the energy of that era and the emotional evolution of a participant, look elsewhere. The writer's clunky, oddly detached, heavily rhetorical style doesn't engage the imagination; it comes to life only briefly, when she describes the townhouse explosion from which she escaped. She spends a lot of time exonerating and justifying herself in retrospect, chronicling the many reservations she said she had about Weatherman's tactics and analysis but that she suppressed at the time. Not much illumination of the era or of the writer.