Flying Close to the Sun

By Cathy Wikerson,

Book cover of Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

Book description

Flying Close to the Sun is the stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Cathy Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, here wrestles with the
legacy of the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Flying Close to the Sun as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Cathy Wilkerson was one of The Weather Underground. She became notorious because The Weather Underground was using her father’s townhouse in Greenwich Village when a bomb was accidentally detonated, killing three people and destroyed the building.

What I love about this book is that it is by a woman in the movement. Most of the people who have written about The Weatherman and the various radical movements of the sixties are men and they are writing from a very different perspective. The women in the movement were dealing not only with their desire to end the war and overturn the…

From Amanda's list on making you a teenage radical.

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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