The Girl I Left Behind: A Personal History of the 1960s

Judith Nies has written a rare and delightful memoir--gripping, personal and historic. The story of the girl she left behind dramatically illustrates the rapid, personal and complex social change of the sixties. Her lively account even illuminates usually dull Washington politics. It is a book for every age: those who lived parallel lives as well as young men and women who want to understand their roots and today's culture. Clare Crawford-Mason, author: The Nun and the Bureaucrat: How They Found an Unlikely Cure for America's Sick Hospitals; Quality or Else, the Revolution in World Business and Thinking About Quality: Progress, Wisdom and the Deming Philosophy

I shared some of the years and experiences in Italy and Washington Judy Nies details so incisively in this must-read book about the Sixties. When I first met her, Judy's intellect intimidated me so much that I assumed she stemmed from the connected, prep-school background as the people she was running such a swath through. Imagine my surprise to learn here she suffered the same disconnect at Johns Hopkins that I did. My wife and I were trying to fit two years of Peace Corps service face to face with life and death in its rawest forms into theoretical frameworks at Johns Hopkins that didn't seem to take these in. Who would have known that Judy was facing a similar dissonance? Nothing seemed to faze her. She was Holly Golightly on speed. Instead of stemming from the privileged background of her classmates at Johns Hopkins, we discover in The Girl I Left Behind that Judy was a scholarship student--not from a sophisticated upbringing but from blue-collar, factory people. All of us who ever experienced a gilded world from the outside will relate deeply to her narrative of trying to find her way through the thickets of an upper-class, prep-school world. I am ultimately grateful that she left the old-boy network of Washington position and power that came her way afterward. It might have diverted her from the harder but finally more splendid curve her life took. Would she have written the books she did or promoted the causes she writes about here? I wonder still whether women like my wife who went into the Peace Corps emerged as different women--women like Judy--because they needed to cope with profoundly life-testing challenges far from support or whether (as my wife thinks) those were the kind of women who went into the Peace Corps in the first place. However that may be, the Sixties made a watershed for our society that I nearly believed the subsequent backlash had quashed. The Girl I Left Behind assures us the ideals of the Sixties still flourish, and for that we owe Judy Nies a debt of gratitude.

[[ASIN:1590303644 The Return of Desire: A Guide to Rediscovering Your Sexual Passion] Living and working in Washington DC as a speechwriter for the men (sic) who famously made government policy during the Vietnam years gave Judith Nies a fascinating life story through which she shows history unfolding that is trenchantly relevant to Iraq-era politics today. As she gradually leaves behind the "girl" who is trained to wear white gloves and ask few questions, she confronts inequities of gender and race, demonstrating how far we've come in the last 40 years--and how far we still have to go. If you've ever wondered if bras were really burned at the Miss America pageant in 1968, how women first got to become news reporters, or how war and peace actually proliferate, read this book--and be sure to discuss it with ten friends.

In "The Girl I Left Behind, Nies personalizes the agonies that America was going through in the turbulent 60s. Her book is a very informative and entertaining chronicle of that troubled era, told with wit and a keen understanding of history. I couldn't put it down!