Flying Close To The Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

(Hardback)

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The memoir of a white middle-class girl from the suburbs who became a terrorist - a bomb-maker for the Weather Underground - and then came to learn lessons from the 1960s that other radicals may not necessarily have cottoned on to. Wilkerson, who famously blew up and escaped from her parents' Greenwich Village townhouse, wrestles with the contradictions of a revolutionary movement: the absence of women's voices; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest, taking lives without ever causing revolutionary foment.

Reviews

Unsparingly maps the idealism, fanaticism, moral absolutism and personal passions that carried her to the townhouse [explosion]. The New York Times


Clear-sighted, self-critical yet unapologetic account. The Los Angeles Times

Author Bio

CATHY WILKERSON was active in the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weathermen. In 1970, she was one of two women to survive an explosion in the basement of her familys townhouse that killed three Weathermen, forcing the group underground. For the past twenty years she has worked as a mathematics educator in New York City schools.