Customer Reviews

Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit & Revolution

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved this book. I am a few years younger than Margo Adler--and I was always about four years years too young to experience the high points of the Sixties directly. Too young to hitch to Woodstock or go to San Francisco for the Beatles last performance, let alone the Summer of Love! Yet, reading Adler's book, I felt I was there. She is articulate and well-spoken, and can breathe life into those years for those of us who were a little too young to participate, and were always left out. Her correspondence with Mark Anderson made my hair stand up on end, not only because of its evocation of the era (and its "The Way We Were" pairing of two very different people), but because it played out like a precursor of a modern Internet romance. Despite the distance between Margot and Mark, despite the fact that they could not meet in person for years, they "connected," and formed formed a strong, passionate bond that enriched both their lives. I highly recommend this book for more reasons that I have space to describe here. Older boomers, read it to recall a time you lived through; younger boomers, read it to experience a time you may have missed; the rest of you guys, just read it! It's not "just" about the Sixties, it's about love and friendship having the power to transcend even a war that was tearing the country apart.

Ms. Adler's book gave me an insight into a time that (I am embarrased to say) I never cared about before. The era that my parents grew up in seemed totally unknown to me before I read this book. All I knew were antiseptic text book notations and footage from Vietnam that seemed less realistic that "Apocalypse Now." I can't thank Ms. Adler enough for letting us into her life, thereby making the 1960's a human experience for me.

I'm a few years younger than Margot Adler, and only got to the shores of the seas she swam in and observed so trenchantly, but what she writes agrees with my memories of what I saw. It was a time when black and white just wouldn't do any more,and when learning to see the greys of life could be an initiatory journey in itself. Margot's earlier book, Drawing Down the Moon, brought me to the feet of the Goddess. The new book will help me teach my students and coven members what it's like to live in two worlds at once. I'm profoundly grateful. And on a lighter note, the portraits of the Zells jibe quite well with friends of mine who knew them well (in all senses of the word). Thanks, Margot!!

It was a curious, somewhat humorous thing at first... that police car with the flattened out roof being used for a speakers platform in the middle of campus. It was the beginning of a painful awakening and an angry rebellion for me that Ms Adler does not quite capture, perhaps because it was no shock to her that "liberty and justice for all" was a lie they'd made us pledge. Nevertheless, it is a brave and revealing story of youthfull struggle against injustice in the world and insecurity in oneself. I'm giving it to my daughter, who hopes to enter UC this fall. Venceremos!

Margot Adler is what's known in some circles as a "VIP" (Very Important Pagan), and that's why I read this book. What I found is that what little it had to say about the author's conversion to neo-paganism was disjointed and unrelated to the rest of the book. This is mainly a life history spanning the author's early life as the child of fringe American communists, through her college years at Berkley in the midst of the Free Speach and Viet Nam war protests. To me it included interesting history but I didn't see all the conections Ms Adler was making