Rough Flavors: One Woman's Activist Odyssey--Inside Protest Movements, Some of Which Worked

When I was eight, I scored so high on an IQ test at school that two women from Columbia University came to test me at home. I'd far up in the genius range--much higher than my brother. But since I was a girl, this was an embarrassment for my family, better forgotten."

Born to troubled and downwardly mobile parents, Sylvia Hart Wright scrabbled her way to Ivy League degrees, a free spirit's globe-trotting lifestyle, and roles at the forefront of major progressive movements of the latter twentieth century. She attracted--and sometimes married--bold, venturesome men and, when she found herself a single mother, built a solid career as a college professor and author.

This extraordinary memoir, spanning over 40 years, is the story of a warrior's stand on America's social and political issues at a turbulent time in its history.

Rough Flavors is Sylvia's front row, eyewitness account of Berkeley in the 1960s, then prepping high school graduates from New York's poorest neighborhoods--where their schools systematically shortchanged them--to go on to college. This led her to intrigues with Black Panthers and their formidable mentor. In following decades, she continued to oppose the Vietnam War and the arms race, stood up for abortion rights, traveled and spoke out for Latin American solidarity movements, and helped shelter the homeless. With candor and wit, she recreates all this and more in the context of her tempestuous personal life, her loves and losses.