Flying Close to the Sun

by Wilkerson, Cathy

• ISBN13: 9781583229255
• ISBN10: 1583229256
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-08-17
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

Flying Close to the Sun is the stunning memoir of a white, middle class girl from Connecticut who became a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Cathy Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, here wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times finding contradictions that many others have avoided: the absence of women's voices then, and in the retelling; the incompetence and the egos; and the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest, which caused little loss of life but which were also ineffective in fomenting revolution. In searching for new paradigms for change, Wilkerson asserts with brave humanity and confessional honesty an assessment of her past-of those heady, iconic times-and somehow finds hope and faith in a world that at times seems to offer neither. Book jacket.

Author Biography

CATHY WILKERSON was active in the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weathermen. In 1970, she was one of two women to survive an explosion in the basement of her family’s townhouse that killed three Weathermen, forcing the group underground. For the past twenty years she has worked as a mathematics educator in New York City schools.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
New England Soil	p. 5
North American Roots	p. 27
Discovering the World	p. 43
The Limits of Electoral Politics	p. 91
New Left Notes	p. 99
Washington SDS	p. 135
1968	p. 171
The Question of Power	p. 241
Weatherman	p. 265
The Explosion	p. 345
The Underground Years	p. 349
Reentry	p. 379
Afterword	p. 389
Chronology of Weatherman Bombings	p. 395
Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins	p. 396
Bibliography	p. 405
Notes	p. 411
Acknowledgments	p. 417
Index	p. 419
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