Overview
Adler was a young woman determined to be taken seriously and to be an agent of change - on her own terms, free from dogma and authoritarian constraints. From campus activism at the University of California at Berkeley to civil-rights work in Mississippi, from antiwar protests to observing the socialist revolution in Cuba, she found those chances in the 1960s. Heretic's Heart illuminates the events, ideas, passions, and ecstatic commitments of the decade like no other memoir. At the book's center is the powerful - and unique - correspondence between Adler, then an antiwar activist at Berkeley, and a young American soldier fighting in Vietnam. The correspondence begins when Adler reads a letter the infantryman has written to a Berkeley newspaper. "I've heard rumors that there are people back in the world who don't believe this war should be. I'm not positive of this though, 'cause it seems to me that if enough of them told the right people in the right way, then something might be done about it....You see, while you're discussing it amongst each other, being beat, getting in bed with dark-haired artists...some people here are dying for lighting a cigarette at night." Heretic's Heart also explores Adler's attempt to come to terms with her singular legacy as the 'only grandchild of Alfred Adler, collaborator of Freud and founder of Individual Psychology, and as the daughter of a forceful beauty who bequeaths her spunk and adventurousness to her daughter, but whose overpowering personality forces Adler to strike out on her own. Adler's memoir marks an initiatory journey from spirit through politics and revolution back to spirit again.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
"I spent most of the 1960s trying desperately to be a cadrea revolutionary communist or socialist footsoldier," declares Adler (Drawing Down the Moon), New York bureau chief for National Public Radio. Though she failed at such fealty to the revolution, her affecting memoir provides a personaland feministperspective on her generation's quest for ideals, which Adler considers the enduring legacy of the 1960s. She grew up in a left-wing milieu in Manhattan; while her father (son of the psychiatrist Alfred Adler) was a Marxist and very assimilated Jew, her mother, vibrant and domineering, introduced Adler to their Jewish heritage. At UC-Berkeley, she joined the Free Speech movement, wherein she learned about the courts, jails and policeand that radical men could still oppress women. The overweight Adler found herself alienated from the "summer of love"; only when she joined a feminist consciousness-raising group in the 1970s did she achieve peace with her body. She devotes a good part of the book to her correspondence (and subsequent meeting) with a soldier in Vietnam; while earnest and tender, this story is too long. Throughout her life, Adler accepted many nontraditional ideals, from ecology to pagan traditions, though she remained wary of a leftism that cannot accept the irrationalfor, she notes, there is a human need for ecstatic experience. Author tour. (Aug.)Library Journal
Adler (Drawing Down the Moon, LJ 11/1/79), the New York bureau chief for National Public Radio, draws on her journals, correspondence with family and friends, and over 200 pages of letters she exchanged with a Vietnam soldier to chronicle her life in the Sixties. She discusses being the granddaughter of psychiatrist Alfred Adler, the only child of Communist sympathizers, a student activist at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and her resulting arrest, her summer of registering black voters in Mississippi, her firsthand experience of the Socialist revolution in Cuba, her experimentations with sex, and her antiwar activism. Adler writes powerfully and with a sharp memory for detail. She concludes that social activism brought real and lasting change. Many will recall Theodore Roszak's The Making of Counter Culture as they read Adler; still others might reject her philosophies and be alarmed by her candor. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Susan Dearstyne, Hudson Valley Community Coll., Troy, N.Y.Booknews
This memoir unfolds along two unique coming-of-age paths: the correspondence between a Berkeley antiwar activist, now the New York bureau chief for National Public Radio and authority on feminist spirituality, and an American soldier in Vietnam in the 1960s, and coming to terms with being the sole grandchild of Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Kirkus Reviews
A stunningly revelatory chronicle of a generation long misunderstood.Adler has made a name for herself as a superb radio journalist (she's New York bureau chief for National Public Radio) and as a leading authority on paganism, feminist spirituality, and witchcraft (Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, 1979). Now Adler proves herself a vital social historian as she shatters the myth that the 1960s were simply sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Using her own life as a jumping off point, Adler insightfully traces the growth of a generation, the development of a society in flux, and her own spiritual, political, and intellectual evolution. The only child of rather unusual parents—her mother was a flamboyant radical educator while her father was a psychiatrist and the son of Freud collaborator Alfred Adler—Adler grew up in a home of Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era. Throughout the '60s she was a Forrest Gump of sorts, on the scene at a variety of momentous events. She participated in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the black voter registration drive in Mississippi, and the Cuban revolution. She also corresponded for a long time with an American soldier stationed in Vietnam. Through it all Adler wrote letters, lots of letters, which she uses as her memory bank. "Much of my journey was already on paper before I sat down to write it," she notes in her introduction. To suggest that Adler's task was simply secretarial, however, is to belittle the depth and honesty with which she addresses her subject. She is extraordinarily open, not only in her analysis of the social movements she chronicles but also about herself and her attempts at understanding.
A candid book whose look backward provides a hopeful blueprint for reviving the possibilities that seemed so endless in the 1960s.