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

Wilkerson, Cathy

Item Information

Edition: Hardback
Pages: 422
ISBN: 9781583227718
Publisher: Seven Stories
Release Date: 2007-09-20

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Memoir of Cathy Wilkerson, activist in the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weather Underground. Wilkerson here wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times looking at contradictions of the movement that many others have avoided: the absence of women’s voices then and in the 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. While proud of many of the accomplishments of the 1960s, years later Wilkerson examines why, in 1970, she in effect accepted the same disregard for human life practiced by the government. 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 finds hope and faith in a world that at times seems to offer neither.