LOOSE CHANGE

Sara Davidson tells the tumultuous story of the sixties through the lives of three women who meet in 1961 when they pledge the same sorority at the University of California at Berkeley. She follows Susie, Tasha, and Sara as they experience many of the defining events and movements of the decade. Davidson sets the private lives of the three women against the public background of the time: the free speech movement, antiwar protests, Woodstock, drugs, the sexual revolution, Eastern spirituality, the avant garde art worlds of New York and Paris, communes, and the first moments of the women's movement. Figures such as Timothy Leary, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, and Joan Baez appear throughout the book. Davidson's candid and intimate chronicle reveals the hopes and disillusionment of a generation whose rites of passage defined one of the most contentious decades of this century.