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Expecting to Fly
by Martha Tod Dudman
Price: 23.00

Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (February 24 2004)
Costumer Rating: Costumer rating

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 5: Eugene McCarthy & The Red Leather Wallet
Back when I was at Alice Deal Junior High School, I got a huge crush on a boy with perfect features. One day he came up to me in the hall. 'I heard you were in a protest march,' he told me.

Chapter 5: Eugene McCarthy & The Red Leather Wallet, Part 2
Outside the quiet snow fell down. The lobby was deserted. We might have been anywhere, in any time. The downtown, old-fashioned city. The USO headquarters next door. The coffee shop with its Formica counters, silent now.



Book Description

It starts with a blue hash pipe in a shabby field and a hot, tight dance at the Mayflower Hotel, and rapidly accelerates against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Sixties.

Describing a time weirdly similar to today, Expecting to Fly recalls a conservative government embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, racial tensions, and a generation of disillusioned young people looking for something meaningful to believe in — teenagers who, like Dudman, hurled themselves into a sea of drugs and sex they weren't really ready for.

With the same passion and brutal honesty that she brought to her first book, Augusta, Gone — the story of her daughter's troubled adolescence — Dudman re-creates her own wild ride through the turbulent Sixties, vividly recounting scenes you probably experienced yourself.

From the prim tradition of a posh girls' school and debutante parties of Washington, D.C., to the snows of New Hampshire and the campaign for Eugene McCarthy, from living out of a knapsack in Spain to getting stoned on acid in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Expecting to Fly takes us on a blistering trip to a time when the only thing you couldn't be was shocked.

Now, years later, Dudman reflects on that time and what it means: "Which was it — triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time?"

You decide.

About the Author

Martha Tod DudmanMartha Tod Dudman

Martha Tod Dudman is the author of Augusta, Gone, winner of a 2001 Books for a Better Life Award. A professional fundraiser, she lives in Northeast Harbor, Maine..

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