Liberalism And The Age Of The Woman

Book Summary

Sawyer chronicles his adventures into the Rdark hole of the universeS--the world outside his small Arkansas hometown. Hitchhiking across the country, enlisting in the U.S. Navy, becoming a college student during the turbulent 1960s are just a few of his adventures. About The Author, JERRY SAWYER: Imagine l957 Bee Branch, Arkansas, population 53. The author was raised four miles from there. The environment included the dregs of the tail-end of western-civilization. It was a secure world, unreflective and complacent. Not only was same-sex marriage not even on anyone's horizon yet, but even homosexuality was something that Big-City Yankees did. At the same time, it was a golden age, with Elvis and blue suede shoes. Now imagine l963 Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. After graduating from high-school at a young seventeen, fleeing Arkansas in his youthful arrogance as the dark hole of the universe, hitchhiking around the country for a couple years to see what was over the next hill, and then enlisting in the U.S. Navy for a four-year hitch, the author enrolled at San Francisco State University. Keep in mind a couple things: l) he was twenty-three by this time, not the typical totally malleable and docile eighteen-year old; and 2) this was not only the turbulent sixties, but SFSU is just across the Bay from the University of California at Berkeley, perhaps the very epicenter of the turbulence. Culture clash The happy-go-lucky adventure quickly changed to a different kind of adventure: an intellectual adventure with high stakes. A clash between the mind-set of rural l950's Arkansas and the heady, giddy atmosphere of Haight-Ashbury and San Francisco state of 1963. I had stumbled into a den of radicals, busy searching out and radically throwing off every vestige of the author's somewhat complacent world-view. The author's response? A pox on both your houses--he rejected both worlds Both were stultifying and degenerate. The upshot is, however, that havingexperienced two worlds, he can now pick and choose. Academia turns out to have been the grain of sand that grew. From SFSU he went to the University of California at Santa Barbarba for the MA in English, where he encountered the Pearl of Great Price in a long Middle English poem of that name; and then he thought his way on to Washington State University for Ph.D. studies. After that he taught English on the college level, moved to Florida and sold real-estate; and then spent the last four years putting down on paper this book he has been mentally writing for thirty years. The author referred to his youthful arrogance. He smiles as he says that the arrogance has not departed, but only matured: he sorrows for any person who fails to read this book

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