Author Description

This is a book about three women, and what happened to them during a unique and turbulent decade in America-the 1960's. It is a book that could only be written by someone who was there-as Sara Davidson was. When the author entered the University of California at Berkely in the early 1960's, she was mainly interested in having fun, pledging a "good" sorority and, eventually, getting married. Her new sorority sisters, Tasha and Susie, had similar goals. None of them could have known that they were entering college just when a tide of social change was building in America-a tide would crest at Berkeley, and would change these women, and the world they knew, forever. At first the three women seem very mush alike. Soon, however, their lives take very different courses, as each woman is radicalized by ideals, by men, and by events. There is Tasha, a golden "California girl" of stunning beauty, with artistic and spiritual instincts, who achieves success in the New York art world-at a price. Susie at first idolizes her ultra-radical husband, a leader in the Berkely Free Speech movement, but later Susie learns what she really needs in a relationship. Sara is a seeker of truth, a writer whose insatiable curiosity takes LOOSE CHANGE is about these three women and their friends, and also about the political and social ferment tof the sixties-the back-to-nature movement, John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, sit-ins and be-ins, Haight-Ashbury, the Summer of Love in New York's East Village, mini-skirts, draftcard burning and bra burning, Woodstock and Altamont, the sexual revolution, the women's movement. LOOSE CHANGE is a major work of social history, a landmark book on what it was like to be young in America in the 1960's. 367 pages.