A memoir of Coleman's formative years during the tumult of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. When his mother, Rosalyn Coleman Gilchrist, a white Oklahoma housewife, attempted to sell her home to a black physician in 1963, she was committed to a mental institution. Inspired by the personal mentorship of radical Catholic antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan -- he was arrested in 1970 along with seven others (called the Flower City Conspiracy) for breaking into the Federal Building in Rochester, New York and shredding Selective Service records. Coleman reflects on his mother s remarkable courage, on his country's tangled history and on the stark moral choices faced by his mother, himself and their two generations.