This is a compelling story of the experiences of three young women who attended the University of California at Berkeley and became caught up in the tumultuous changes of the Sixties. Sara Davidson follows the three―Susie, Tasha, and Sara herself―from their first meeting in 1962, through the events that "radicalized" them in unexpected ways in the decade after the years in Berkeley. Susie navigates through the Free Speech Movement and the early women's movement in Berkeley, and Tasha enters the trendy New York art and society scene. Sara, a journalist, travels the country reporting on the stories of the sixties. The private lives that Davidson reconstructs are set against the public background of the time. Figures such as Timothy Leary, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, and Joan Baez are here, as are the many young people who sought alternatives to "the establishment" through whatever means seemed worth radical politics, meditation, drugs, group sex, or dropping out. Davidson's honest and detailed chronicle reveals the hopes, confusion, and disillusionment of a generation whose rites of passage defined one of the most contentious decades of this century.
Author
Sara was born in 1943 and grew up in California. She went to Berkeley in the Sixties, where the rite of passage was to "get stoned, get laid and get arrested." After Berkeley she headed for New York to attend the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her first job was with the Boston Globe, where she became a national correspondent, covering everything from the election campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon to the Woodstock Festival and the student strike at Columbia. Returning to New York, she worked as a free-lance journalist for magazines ranging from Harpers, Esquire and the New York Times to Rolling Stone. She was one of the group who developed the craft of literary journalism, combining the techniques of fiction with rigorous reporting to bring real events and people to life. Her work is collected in the textbook,The Literary Journalists, by Norman Sims. Sara moved back to California where for 25 years, she alternated between writing for television and writing books. The books tend to fall in the gray zone between memoir and fiction. She uses the voice of the intimate journalist, drawing on material from her life and that of others and shaping it into a narrative that reads like fiction. In television, she created two drama series, Jack and Mike, and Heart Beat, which ran on A.B.C. She was later co-executive producer of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, wrote hundreds of hours of drama episodes, movies and miniseries, and in 1994 was nominated for a Golden Globe. In the year 2000, her life began to unravel. She was divorced, her children were leaving for college and she couldn't find work in television. Following her intuition, knowing nobody, she drove to Boulder, Colorado for three months to be a visiting writer at the University of Colorado. She never drove back, and is piecing together a different life which she writes about in Leap Her current passions are: singing with friends, the "Shady Angels," learning piano, skiing and hiking in the Rockies.
