From Library Journal
Adler (Drawing Down the Moon, LJ 11/1/79), the New York bureau chief for National Public Radio, draws on her journals, correspondence with family and friends, and over 200 pages of letters she exchanged with a Vietnam soldier to chronicle her life in the Sixties. She discusses being the granddaughter of psychiatrist Alfred Adler, the only child of Communist sympathizers, a student activist at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and her resulting arrest, her summer of registering black voters in Mississippi, her firsthand experience of the Socialist revolution in Cuba, her experimentations with sex, and her antiwar activism. Adler writes powerfully and with a sharp memory for detail. She concludes that social activism brought real and lasting change. Many will recall Theodore Roszak's The Making of Counter Culture as they read Adler; still others might reject her philosophies and be alarmed by her candor. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Susan Dearstyne, Hudson Valley Community Coll., Troy, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Adler, the New York bureau chief for National Public Radio and author of
Drawing Down the Moon (1987), remembers the 1960s not as a time of hedonism or rebellion but as an era of ideas and commitment. A vague but persistent urge to write about that period and her own intense political experiences became a consuming passion after she discovered a forgotten cache of journals and letters, the source of startlingly vital accounts of her years at Berkeley as a member of the Free Speech Movement, her voter registration work in Mississippi, her candid correspondence with an American soldier in Vietnam (the most arresting passages in this altogether moving book), and her sojourns in Cuba. An adept and fearless memoirist, Adler begins by profiling her complex parents, then traces her evolution from a dreamy, overweight child to a self-characterized "left-wing nun" willing to go to jail for her beliefs. Observant and questing, Adler has always eschewed political dogma, drawing, instead, on a deep sense of justice, and it is her spirituality and integrity that enable her, still, to witness humanity at its worst and yet remain optimistic and involved.
Donna Seaman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
