Dance The Eagle To Sleep

(Paperback)

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Description

Originally published in 1970, readers follow the lives of four teenagers in a near-future society, as they rebel against the military draft and 'the system'. From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the centre of the revolt, to their attempt to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain and their ultimate brutal repression, this is future fiction without the fantasy. This 40th anniversary edition features a new, reflective and unapologetic introduction by the author.

Reviews

"Dance the Eagle to Sleep bears a strong family resemblance, in kind and quality, to William Golding's Lord of the Flies and to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It would be no surprise to see it become, like these others, a totem and legend of the young."
--Time

"Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a vision, not an argument... It is brilliant. Miss Piercy was a published poet before she resorted to the novel, exploiting its didactic aspect, and her prose crackles, depolarizes, sends shivers leaping across the synaptic cleft. The 'eagle' is America, bald and all but extinct. The 'dance' is performed by the tribal young, the self-designated 'Indians, ' after their council meetings, to celebrate their bodies and their escape from the cannibalizing 'system.' The eagle isn't danced to sleep; it sends bombers to devastate the communes of the young... What a frightening, marvelous book!"
--New York Times

"It's so good I don't even know how to write a coherent blurb. It tore me apart. It's one of the first really honest books this country has ever produced. In lesser hands it would've been just another propaganda pamphlet, but in Marge Piercy's it's an all-out honest-to-God novel, humanity and love hollering from every sentence and the best set of characters since, shit I dunno, Moby Dick or something. At a time when nearly every other novelist is cashing in on masturbation fantasies, the superhip college bullshit stored up in their brains, even on the revolution itself, here is somebody with the guts to go into the deepest core of herself, her time, her history, and risk more than anybody else has so far, just out of a love for the truth and a need to tell it. It's about fucking time."
--Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow

"Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a frightening book, which will reassure only those who can take solace from the fact that it is cast as a futuristic novel. This is no real solace, since Marge Piercy has used the future only as a parabolic mirror of the recent past: her novel is indirectly about the Movement, more specifically about the rise, fragmentation, and fall of the Students for a Democratic Society."
--The New Republic

"Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a cautionary tale, but it is more than that. It is an important political document. I hope the book is read."
--The Nation

Author Bio

Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels, including the bestselling Braided Lives, Gone to Soldiers, and Woman on the Edge of Time; numerous volumes of poetry; and a critically acclaimed memoir, Sleeping with Cats. She is the recipient of four honorary doctorates and has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time. She lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.