Heretics Heart CL

""I spent most of the 1960s trying desperately to be a cadre--a 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 personal--and feminist--perspective 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 police--and 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 irrational--for, she notes, there is a human need for ecstatic experience. Author tour. (Aug.)