Description
Book SynopsisYoung people are rediscovering a vision that 'another world is possible' and dedicating themselves to public service. Alice and Staughton Lynd offer a significant model of what it can mean to devote a lifetime to these ideals.
Trade ReviewWithout radicals like the Lynds, there might have been no American Revolution, no Abolition, no Suffrage, no New Deal, no environmental laws and so on.... Through all the storms, Staughton and Alice have represented the basic blend of moral force, critical inquiry and trust in the evidence of things unseen that have helped rank-and-file people become the driving force wherever great social reforms were achieved. -- Tom Hayden
In this moving double memoir, Alice and Staughton Lynd show us a way to live with love and integrity in a world of violence and inequality. They take the reader down unexpected roads, making difficult choices that often require harsh sacrifice. Together they find beauty where others might find only despair. Their lives practicing 'accompaniment' inspire hope that a better world is possible and show us that the journey is worth the pain. Read this remarkable story and your spirit will be enriched. -- Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign
Staughton and Alice Lynd forged an extraordinary partnershiop over half a century, which carried them from Harvard and Radcliffe to the deep South, from there to union organizing in the Midwest, and then to experiences in Latin America and the Middle East. Through that winding journey, they were rock-like in their commitment to peace and social justice, and steadfast in their bond to one another. They remain a model of two people unbreakably joined together by a life-long commitment to build a better, kindlier world. This is a memoir to inspire the next generation. -- Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States and professor emeritus of Political Science, Boston University
Alice and Staughton Lynd have written a memoir of a shared life lived in service to ordinary people, with rigorous commitment to nonviolence. Their journey led them to each other than then together to the civil rights, labor, anti-war and prisoner's rights movements. Theirs is a story of lives given daily in thought and action towards building a world of peace and justice. The Lynds imagine their children and grandchildren taking in their experience and building on it, and hope we will do the same. The meat and the challenge of this book are not in the account of movements and organizing, although it could be read just for the history. The real grist in this mill is the account of two people searching for community, for peace, and for justice. * Fellowship, Fall 2009 *
In their lifelong commitment to each other and to their common cause, Alice and Staughton Lynd provide an inspiring vision of what 'the personal is the political' can really mean. -- Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!
Table of ContentsForeword Acknowledgments Introduction Beginnings Son of Middletown When I Was Little Friends A Premature New Leftist Music and Dance and Discovering Childhood Story Street Community Macedonia After Macedonia Starfish The Sixties Cooper Square We Shall Overcome A Trip to Hanoi Draft Counseling War Crimes and the End of the Sixties Accompaniment The Idea of "Accompaniment" Doing Oral History Together We Become Lawyers Our Union Makes Us Strong Nicaragua Palestine The Worst of the Worst Mama Bear Lucasville Mr. X The Death Penalty and the Prison System Afterwords Covering Little Seeds A Letter to Martha Retrospectives Happy
