Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

“On the morning of March 6, 1970, in the subbasement of 18 W. 11th Street in Greenwich Village, a piece of ordinary water pipe, filled with dynamite, nails, and an electric blasting cap, ignited by mistake…”

 So begins this stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Cathy Wilkerson, who famously blew up and escaped from a Greenwich Village townhouse, here wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times looking at contradictions of the movement that many others have avoided: the absence of women’s voices then and in the retelling; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest which caused little loss of life but which were also ineffective in fomenting revolution. While proud of many of the accomplishments of the 1960s, years later Wilkerson examines why, in 1970, she in effect accepted the same disregard for human life practiced by the government.  In searching for new paradigms for change, Wilkerson asserts with brave humanity and confessional honesty an assessment of her past—of those heady, iconic times—and finds hope and faith in a world that at times seems to offer neither. 

Cathy Wilkerson was active in the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weather Underground. In 1970, she, along with Kathy Boudin, survived an explosion in the basement of her parents’ townhouse that killed three Weathermen, forcing the two underground. For the past twenty years she has worked as an educator teaching teachers in the New York City schools.