Sunday, May 21, 2017

the last book I ever read (David Talbot's Season of the Witch, excerpt seven)

from Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot:

Good Earth members briefly considered turning to armed resistance against the police brutality. But, they decided, that’s not who they were. Instead of going down the violent path of the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and other armed groups on the radical left, Good Earth found a good lawyer. His name was Tony Serra, and with his long Native American-looking hair, pirate’s gold tooth, and stoner aura, he seemed every bit the spacey hippie that the Good Earth hard hippies disdained. But when it came to the legal battlefield, Tony Serra was a brilliant warrior.

Serra, a San Francisco native, grew up in the outer Sunset district in an artistic, blue-collar family that also produced a younger brother, Richard, who would become a world-renowned sculptor. Their father, an immigrant from Mallorca, Spain, made jelly beans. Their mother, a Russian-Jewish bohemian aesthete, later killed herself, walking straight into the ocean at the end of Taraval Street, where she had taken her boys to the beach when they were growing up. Serra majored in philosophy at Stanford and threw thimself into combative sports, joining the boxing and football teams. After graduating from law school in 1962, he tried to avoid his professional destiny, bumming around Morocco and South America and writing bad poetry.



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