Bitch‪.‬

September 1968, be a freshman at the great University of California at Berkeley, in the swirl of the Sixties rushing onto the Seventies. War, community anarchy, women's movements, art and drugs, revolution and academia. Co-exist with compelling local and national problems and issues represented in movements, groups, biases, influences, prejudices, feelings, riots, contortions, lies - all fed by elusive, evasive, ephermeral humans. Five students exist. What is reality? Survive without knowing.

What is revolution, who is V.I. Lenin? Was feminism and woman's lib washed and weakened by hippiedom and its shifting cultural revolution? Being shielded from the draft and living safe from perversion exposed one to the Establishment orgy in Vietnam. Was the drug infested society conducive to artist accomplishment, or did it make repetition and restatement an acceptable replacement for creative achievement? Did academic establish goals to advance knowledge, or present only processes to filter eager-pleasers through its ersatz synthesized systems?

Nothing in the five lives twirling around and over the students was certain. A sixteen year old adolescent put herself through the ringers of sexual, political, cultural and psychological trails when chasing the conventional wisdoms of Berkeley. Expecting revolution to come magically to town and to the United States, when consciousness was ever-present, was foolhardy for an 18 year-old guy; yet he believes his dreams. The energy, emotions and excitement of voices, of spontaneity, of violence - creativity and sensitivity - expressed by everyone, everywhere in the community made no human being original. Out of the swill Berkeley produces no one of note for the world. Berkeley's academics falter and forego what made its schools exemplary and excellent: publish or perish, flunk one-quarter of the students, keep the bureaucracy small. The town and University forsook its thriving heritage and a promising future.

Like the lifting dream of the Nixon years Berkeley became the nightmare from the Sixties illuminated by a thousand points of light: a whirl of static, social spirals, economic convolutions, political furls and sexual spins. Young adults unable to vote but able to fight in Vietnam were trapped and alone. Of the five students Bitch. [a verb not a noun] chronicles their settings, personalities, activities and actions, emotions and their inability to balance gross failures with minor successes. In the end each never wonders about those Berkeley years - the happenings, the miracles, the wonderment, the wow. Why did it all stop? Years at Berkeley - ideals, hopes and perceptions - the five experienced the death of youth.

This edition, the Third, is corrected with 90 more notes, another 10-15,000 words, an improved bibliography and an enlarged lexicon.