The Sixties had been romanticized and vilified. Rarely had it been described from the circumstance of ordinary observer/participant. Thanks to an accident of the author’s birth, he had been caught up in something extraordinary. Severed Arms. Illuminated in the severing—by a policeman’s billie—of arms intertwined to corral and protect draft resisters.
The result? Five stories. Five windows into the story-teller’s growing up in the Sixties.
Marshall was his college roommate, but was also a mirror into his identity.
Rachel, his brief lover, was a romantic deliverance from the ambiguities of the times.
Paul, his new friend, had one foot rooted in middle-class ambition, the other gliding toward revolution.
Wolfe, self-styled shaman—his seductive personality pared life into its essence, where anything was possible.
Bobbie, casting aside her inherited middle class respectability, communed in the lust of the living moment until she—and he—had taken their ‘revolution’ as far as they could.