Mary Bentham, Student

More than a half century ago, there was a cultural upheaval in the Western world. In the United States, it swept across college campuses and left an imprint on all who lived through it. The Vietnam War, civil rights, the women's reproductive rights and equality in the workplace, and the environmental movement for clean air and clean water. Student activism played an outsized role in each of those movements. Some students were radicalized; most were not. But few were left unaffected by the events that shaped the decade of the 1960s.

This book is a fictional account of a young woman from a small mid-western town who experiences a growing awareness of a larger world when she enters university. It documents her passage during her college years through those often emotionally charged times: the civil rights battles in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, the emergence of Senator Eugene McCarthy as a standard-bearer of the anti-War movement that was to become a major political force as the death toll in Vietnam continued to rise. The story culminates with her close encounters with efforts to suppress dissent during the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.