In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture - a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nation's political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.
In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called “free”; the anxieties and occasional terrors of late-night, drug-fueled visits of biker gangs looking to party; and his own quest for the next high. His road through revolution brought him to adulthood and to his major role as a political strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council, from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star.
In this intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his ride through the heart of the counterculture a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege in New York to the riotous political street theater in San Francisco. Chronicling the revolutionary theories of the Diggers and the encampments of the extended Free Family, Coyote offers blunt and affectionate portraits of friends, lovers, and fellow travelers In prose that 1s graphic and unsentimental, Coyote also reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called “free,” the terror evoked by bikers who came on late night visits looking for drugs, and Coyote's own quest for the next h h Hisroad through revolution taught him to be a player and a strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council; from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star. Sleeping Where I Fall pays honest tribute to the spiritual search of a generation that had become morally estranged from the dominant culture, a generation that transformed the politics—then the heart 'dsoul—of America.
