false 1543245 1583227717 9781583227718 47 22 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184965178m/1543245.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1543245.Flying_Close_to_the_Sun_My_Life_and_Times_As_a_Weatherman 718860 Cathy Wilkerson 47 22 4 2 false Tue Jun 10 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Mar 27 12:33:21 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 10 19:45:59 -0700 2008
In fact she doesn't start getting into the notorious Weatherman stories until 300 pages deep; in the meantime a dizzying number of other organizations and leaders are name-dropped, but it's very interesting to see how they overlapped in productive and obstructive ways.

For all the time she spent distancing herself from and apologizing for the terrorist actions of the WUO, I thought she really wasn't the member most qualified to write a memoir (eg: she hid under a van during the Days of Rage demonstration), but in the end she does deliver. The details of the famed townhouse explosion are especially intriguing.

But most interesting about this book -- and the WUO ideology in general -- is how it addressed many faces of the 60's revolution at once: anti-war, civil rights, and feminism. She and her contemporaries (for the most part) realized it was the same system and the same perception of reality that oppressed the Vietnamese as African-Americans and women all over the world. Her accounts of their struggles reminded me how much things have changed in the last 50 years and how much more change is possible.]]>