num_pages: 344
description: Among the representative men of our era, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. stands out as that unique individual whose life and career epitomize the dramatic issues and conflicts - social, political, spiritual and academic - of his time.CIA operative and civil rights activist, clergyman and iconoclast, army officer and champion of draft resisters, aspiring concert pianist and formidable athlete - Coffin truly has been a child of the century. Here is a man of unquenchable vitality and prodigious capabilities: relishing the challenges to advocates of liberty, equality and fraternity, posed by a complex and contradictory universe. Here is a man to whom civil disobedience has been more than a lofty abstraction: jailed in Alabama with Ralph Abernathy, on trial in Boston with Dr. Spock, at odds with the trustees and officers of Yale, he has never hesitated to risk the worst in order to achieve the best. And here is a profoundly reflective and deeply humorous man, whose tough-minded spirituality has been tempered in the furnace of public action.Once To Every Man encompasses five tumultuous decades, and sweeps the reader from the fashionable world of New York society to the chaos of Europe at war, from Ivy League campuses to Peace Corps training camps in Puerto Rican jungles, from clandestine anti-Communist operations to the March on the Pentagon, from racial strife in the South to a Black Panther rally in New Haven. It offers an indispensable perspective on many of the crucial events of the past fifty years, and an unforgettable portrait of the man who figured so prominently in them.
language: English
title: Once to Every Man: A Memoir
titlecomplete: Once to Every Man: A Memoir
genres: Biography, Memoir, Autobiography
ratings_count: 19
publisher: Atheneum