![]() ![]() ![]() Micah's best friend, she learned 20 years later, was sexually abused by an older boy and his girlfriend her father slept with students and virtually any other woman he ran across in retaliation her mother began an affair with the man who would eventually become her lifelong partner. They took in troubled teens referred by the courts and children disabled by mental illness, aiming to help them grow up "free from the suffocating values of mainstream society." "We're changing the established order," her charismatic, feckless father asserted, handing out guns to juvenile delinquents and organizing a "war" between Romans and Celts in which the retreating Romans set fire to a pagan shrine. Perks was 6 weeks old in 1963 when her parents borrowed $20,000 to buy 550 acres of land in the Adirondacks and establish the Valley Commune School. 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. It's always a pleasure to read a memoir about the 1960s that doesn't rationalize or recriminate but instead concentrates on conveying the texture of those wild times. ![]()
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