Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit & Revolution - Hardcover

Adler, Margot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080707098X ISBN 13: 9780807070987

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1997

Synopsis

A refreshing, personal look back at the 1960s and their impact on American history and culture offers a portrait of a free speech advocate at Berkeley during the sixties, a woman who helped register black voters, and an anti-war activist who began a friendship with a soldier in Vietnam.

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Reviews

A stunningly revelatory chronicle of a generation long misunderstood. Adler has made a name for herself as a superb radio journalist (she's New York bureau chief for National Public Radio) and as a leading authority on paganism, feminist spirituality, and witchcraft (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, 1979). Now Adler proves herself a vital social historian as she shatters the myth that the 1960s were simply sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Using her own life as a jumping off point, Adler insightfully traces the growth of a generation, the development of a society in flux, and her own spiritual, political, and intellectual evolution. The only child of rather unusual parents--her mother was a flamboyant radical educator while her father was a psychiatrist and the son of Freud collaborator Alfred Adler--Adler grew up in a home of Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era. Throughout the '60s she was a Forrest Gump of sorts, on the scene at a variety of momentous events. She participated in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the black voter registration drive in Mississippi, and the Cuban revolution. She also corresponded for a long time with an American soldier stationed in Vietnam. Through it all Adler wrote letters, lots of letters, which she uses as her memory bank. ``Much of my journey was already on paper before I sat down to write it,'' she notes in her introduction. To suggest that Adler's task was simply secretarial, however, is to belittle the depth and honesty with which she addresses her subject. She is extraordinarily open, not only in her analysis of the social movements she chronicles but also about herself and her attempts at understanding. A candid book whose look backward provides a hopeful blueprint for reviving the possibilities that seemed so endless in the 1960s. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080707098X
• ISBN 13: 9780807070987
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309