Pagan Time: An American Childhood, by Micah Perks
“Micah Perks's matter-of-fact re-creation of her counterculture childhood makes it clear that living without rules had severe consequences, but she also captures the anarchic pleasures of that life.” --Wendy Smith, Amazon.com
There are a lot of memoirs of the 1960s, and what it was like to grow up as a child in New Age or visionary cults... but this, truly, is my favorite. It’s amazing she’s left standing to tell it all.
Today, Micah Perks now runs the creative writing program at UCSC. But as an infant, Perks’ parents loaded her into their VW bug, and drove into the mountains to open a "self-determined" school for troubled youths and young adults. These were the young people she grew up with. In a true-to-life Lord of the Flies climax, her father engineers a war between “Romans” and “Celts.”
Never succumbing to the scandalized eye of the institution, Perks views her experience with a steady gaze and observes the sacrifice, distortion, and benefits of a life against where freedom conjured up the spirit of Bobbie McGee: Freedom's just another word for nothing— nothing left to lose.
Narrated by the excellent Emily Rankin, who also narrated Impulse by Steven Gould. She makes it sound like she's letting you in on secrets she's never before revealed.
--Susie Bright
