What Sammy Knew: A Novel

"A striking coming-of-age novel set in New York City at the beginning of 1970 as a young man escapes his Long Island suburb to Manhattan where he becomes swept up in the radical causes of the era. As the 1960s turn into 1970 in the Long Island suburb of Great Neck, seventeen-year old Sam Stein is falling in love for the first time. Kim is a young radical in a place where bourgeois white families consign the raising of their children to their live-in black maids, and as Sam struggles to understand his connection to their maid Tutu, the woman who raised him, the disaffected teenagers escape to the drug-soaked East Village of Manhattan, where they pledge themselves to radical causes. Blacks and whites, domestic servants and Black Panthers, vivid drug trips, first love, Weathermen, and parents who understand nothing--this is the world of American disaffection when the 1960s came home to roost. David Laskin's novel addresses the big questions that still haunt American life, and is a tender and painful story about loss of innocence, a reminder that even across divides we can save each other"--… (more)