The Change Chronicles: A Novel of the Sixties Antiwar Movement

In the Sixty’s predawn of the Women’s Liberation Movement, young Nora Seikh, full of self-doubts after an abusive relationship and a failed subsequent attempt at love, searches amid Berkeley’s budding antiwar movement for new ways to live and love, even while she struggles to find new paths to peace. Reporting antiwar news for the Berkeley Barb, she meets a flamboyant activist and, after a brief affair, is left pregnant and alone. She flings herself into the nonviolent vigil and demonstrations at the gates of Port Chicago, West Coast shipping point for weapons to the Vietnam War. There, she comes to share the demonstrators’ mutual caring and to quietly love Ted, a vigil leader. On the night Ted races forward to stop a weapons truck that will not halt, she must confront her old self-doubts and fears, and risk all-life and freedom and even the child she bears-to reach him. Taking this step, she comes to see her own, and others’, deepest need is to give love. Months later, Nora gives birth. No longer so self-doubting, still she cannot-in those years of the baby-scoop era -break through the overweening concept a child needs a home with two parents, and gives up her baby in adoption, for his sake. Then Nora must go on, trying to balance sorrows and hope-and to continue the struggle for a better world.