Drag Me Out Like a Lady

Book excerpt: She was arrested in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. She was at the Be-In when Timothy Leary told us to drop out. She was in the battle of People's Park when James Rector was killed. She was tear-gassed on campus at UC Berkeley. She was at Altamont when a Hell's Angel murdered a concertgoer. Now she has written her autobiography, describing her unusual trajectory through an unusual era. In the spirit of Howard Zinn, Jentri Anders presents her life as an activist and anthropologist. A Southerner with deep roots in Georgia and Arkansas, she went to high school in Groveland, Florida, one of the most notorious locations in black history. Expelled from both a Georgia Bible college and Florida State University for political reasons, she moved to California, participated in the antiwar movement there, then was sexually and politically harrassed out of UC Berkeley. She dropped out of mainstream culture to become a back-to-the-land hippie in what is now called the Emerald Triangle in Humboldt County, California, then dropped back in, wrote the definitive ethnography of back-to-the-land hippies, and was featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film, Berkeley in the Sixties. A fascinating writer, Anders is also a scholar. Drag Me Out Like a Lady is thoroughly researched, indexed, referenced, and documented, including historical material from her personal files. Cultural historians, anthropologists, activists, feminists, literate hippies, as well as people who just like weird stories, will all love this book