In the Company of Rebels: A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads, and History Makers by Chellis Glendinning
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Knox Book Beat The Berkeley Times Scheduled for 29 August 2019
 
Are you a visitor or new arrival wondering “So what’s the deal with Berkeley, anyway?” A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads and History Makers is exactly what you need for context and navigation here, especially; but also for grafting most radical explorations from the past 70 years onto the next 70 (if we’re lucky) as well. Chellis Glendinning may have been a curious Midwestern (Cleveland) social sciences major when she sat down in front of the national guardsmen here at Sather Gate in May of 1969, but she rose up with the fire of her mother’s civil rights activism in her belly to lead a life of “The dissenter…the one who speaks the truth no matter the consequences,” wrote and kept writing about all of it and lived that out for another fifty years.
The brilliance of this volume lies in her dogged persistence, penetrating celebration of the “archetypal…hyper-creative” and “pre institutional… in the human experience,” and the fabulous good fortune to have met, observed, conversed and corresponded with all these pioneers of the eco-feminist, mytho-poetic, bio-regionalist, utopian, social justice, neo-luddite, green, anarchist, systems theory, Native/Indigenous/Latino personal and community sovereignty and traditional culture, art and storytelling movements.

Starting with Pat Cody of Cody’s Books, who “looked like your typical, plainly dressed, liberal mother. But in reality… was a blaze of radical ideas and action,” and Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra of Elmwood (yes, OUR Elmwood!) Institute, co-writers of “progressive, neither-left-nor-right” Green Politics in 1984;Glendinning moves through spangles of encounters and friendships with amazing people like a surrealistic series of beaded curtains; right up through Saul Landau, documentary filmmaker of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, contributor to Mother Jones and Ramparts magazines, follower of the Institute for Policy Studies’ “global overview” and subject of a “monstrous FBI file with all the juicy parts deleted,” undocumented workers and shamanic poets “addressing the essential qualities of anarchy, biodiversity, cultural diversity and home-grown community. Up my alley, for sure.”
How could she know all these people? And be on the ground floor and historian of all these movements? At first, I sincerely doubted she went to Bolivia with Tom Hayden, “one of the main organizers of the protests outside the Democratic Convention (in 1968) …one of the Chicago 8” and could blithely drop names from Susan Griffin and Jerry Mander to Wendell Berry and 78-year-old Ruth Youngdahl Nelson, anti-nuclear activist who shouted down Coast Guard defenders of the Trident submarine from a rubber dinghy in the Bay with “Young man, not in my America!”

Fritjof Capra, Ecoarchitecture

By the end, I didn’t even care if they were “true stories” or not. They were all moving, deeply human and superb. Even when her subjects were telling her something uncomfortably true about the planet, our human hyper-technological future or herself. The wonderful thing about them is how often she told me something I'd told myself that I'd never heard covered or hinted at in the conventional press.
I tried to “skim” these portraits mid-book, but it was impossible. From the weird to the heroic; she was there, she met them, she remembered and recreated conversations and anecdotes, quoted letters, distilled relationships and attitudes succinctly. Example: in the “The Roaring Inside Her” chapter: What did the patriarchy do to us (women)? “They took away the stars and tried to divert our distress by giving us diamonds.” Wow. Select Social Movements of the late 1900s 101, two-thirds of the real “underground” movers and shakers of the U.S.A. since the 1950s. Here’s your guide…

Knox Book Beat The Berkeley Times Scheduled for 29 August 2019
In the Company of Rebels: A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads, and History Makers.

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