Description

"Unsparingly maps the idealism, fanaticism, moral absolutism and personal passions that carried her to the town house explosion]."-"The New York Times"

"Clear-sighted, self-critical yet unapologetic account."-"Los Angeles Times"

"You'll want to plunge right into Cathy Wilkerson's "Flying Close to the Sun." If you're a 60s survivor (as I am), you'll know it's the real thing."-Carol Brightman, Truthdig

""Flying Close to the Sun" is, above all else, a well-written record of Wilkerson's evolving beliefs-a point-by-point memoir of innumerable arguments with herself over political philosophies and innovations."-"The Phoenix" (Boston)

"At times exciting and at other times refl ective, "Flying Close to the Sun" is always captivating."-Ron Jacobs, "CounterPunch"

"Flying Close to the Sun" is the stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a 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 its retelling; the incompetence and the egos; 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.

Cathy Wilkerson was active in the civil rights movement, SDS, and the Weather Underground. In 1970, she, along with Kathy Boudin, survived an explosion in the basement of her parents' townhouse that killed three Weathermen, forcing the two underground. For the past twenty years she has worked as an educator.