An account of three young women who attended the University of California at Berkeley and became caught up in the tumultuous changes of the 60s. Sara Davidson follows the three - Susie, Tasha and Sara herself - from their first meeting in 1962, through the events that radicalized them in unexpected ways in the decade after the years in Berkeley. Susie navigates through the Free Speech Movement and the early women's movement in Berkeley, and Tasha enters the trendy New York art and society scene. Sara, a journalist, travels the country reporting on the stories of the 60s. The private lives that Sara reconstructs are set against the public background of the time. Figures such as Timothy Leary, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden and Joan Baez are here, as are the many young people who sought alternatives "to the establishment" through whatever means seemed worth exploring: radical politics; meditation; group sex or dropping out. The book provides a detailed chronicle of the hopes, confusion and disillusionment of a generation whose rites of passage defined one of the most contentious decades of this century.