Dance the Eagle to Sleep

Marge's first novel. This is an important historical document. It is really in novel form, with the grace, strength, vigor and torque of Marge Piercy's particular view, this is a distillation of what the SDS RYM faction thought a revolutionary change in America would be like, written close to the moment. It has excitment, vigor of both a moral and a page turning type, and it reads like science fantasy today even though at the time it was conceived thousands of people probably thought it was political realism. While at the time I would have said what I say now, that real change wont happen until the great batallions of working and farming people in this country move into action, the dream, the justice sought, and the excitement here is 100 times more important than what turned out to be fanciful. If in those days people had these fanciful dreams, with wars, near depression conditions, rising crises in health, homelessness, and the collapse even of bourgeois educationa nd social servidces for working people only beginning, the young Marge Piercy's cherished ream of a better world and faith somehow it could be fought for and won are worth a 1000 cynical, self-centered, neurotic tales that ignore the immorality and crime of this system and the need to tear it down.