Leslie Brody’s account of coming of age in the radical counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies takes her on an unpredictable odyssey from an awkward adolescence on Long Island to paramilitary training in Chicago, communal living in Ann Arbor, violent protests in the streets of San Francisco, and finally on a quixotic journey via Amsterdam and London to meet with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris to end the war.
“This is a wonderful book. As a teen-age anti-Vietnam war protester from Long Island suburbia adrift in the American counterculture of the 1960’s, Leslie Brody was as brave as she was foolish and as foolish as she was brave. Idealistic as Candide and adventurous as Boxcar Bertha, she emerges–just barely as a savvy feminist survivor with her red suitcase crammed with tangible evidence of the turbulent and treacherous currents that nearly submerged her. Along the way, Brody reflects on the writers who helped her survive, including Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath. They would all, I think, join me in applauding her honesty and moral commitment to what she knew was right.”
– Ann Charters, author of Kerouac: A Biography
“Few books about growing up in the sixties and being young in the seventies convey the ecstasy and misery of those days as Leslie Brody’s memoir does…I uneasily relived some of it, and was sorry to see the book end.”
– Andrei Codrescu