Goat Brothers

In a crisp portrait of a generation, Colton entwines his own life story with those of four fraternity brothers with whom he bonded amid the 1960s student protests at the University of California-Berkeley. He had a brief career as a major-league baseball pitcher, then became a writer in Oregon. Twice divorced (his first wife was actress Hedy Lamarr's daughter), Colton recently overcame marijuana and alcohol addiction. Among his PiKA brothers, Jim van Hoften, a bomber pilot in Vietnam, became an astronaut on the Challenger space shuttle and is now an aerospace executive. Hard-drinking, womanizing Steve Radich, a cynical Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, cheated on two wives; his New Age spiritual search ended in death when he crashed his plane in 1979. ``Country bumpkin'' Loren Hawley went into real estate, spent a year in jail for tax evasion, avoided commitment with women but ultimately married in 1989. Ron Vaughn, a black man who passed for white, was racked with ambivalence over his identity and guilt at having abandoned a child he had fathered. He underwent psychiatric hospitalization, recovered and became an architect. In this male counterpart to Sara Davidson's Loose Change (which chronicles the lives of three UC sorority sisters), Colton powerfully tells the stories of the five men's search for self-worth, their difficulty in communicating their feelings, and their anger toward women. Photos. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Feb.)