The Burning Man Festival is a weeklong spasm of radical self-expression held annually just before Labor Day since 1986. In late August 2003, more than 33,000 participants converged in Nevada's Black Rock Desert for this counterculture event staged as an experiment in temporary community.

The participants gather to rid themselves of the conventional structures of their life and to "sample" the alternatives in hundreds of theme camps. The climax of the festival comes when attendees erupt into cheers and applause at the burning of a forty-foot-tall human effigy described as "part...

"This telling of an extraordinary old woman's love affair with the American twentieth century--her unheralded vital place in its art, her delight in its diversity, her lifelong Left activism, eyes-wide-open to both blessings and bummers--is a tonic for existential despair. We need this wonderful book."--Ronnie Gilbert, The Weavers

At seventeen Seema Aissen got her first job drying prints in a photo-finishing lab in Boston and joined the newly-founded Young Communist League; at thirty-three she was hired by Ansel Adams to run his darkroom in Yosemite; at thirty-seven she married...

Born in Minnesota and raised in Chicago, Jenny Vincent was educated at a progressive private school and Vassar College. Introduced to international folk music at an early age, she remains a performer and champion of this "music of the people."

In 1936, Jenny and her first husband visited northern New Mexico at the invitation of D. H. Lawrence's widow. Enchanted with the place and its people, they purchased a ranch that has been Jenny's home ever since.

Jenny believed strongly in social advocacy, which she expressed through song. She performed with such luminaries as Pete...