Altars in the Street: A Neighborhood Fights to Survive

Chavis is a community activist, a Buddhist and a private investigator who works on trials and appeals for California death-row inmates. Her razor-sharp autobiographical memoir offers a liberal-minded tour of the Bay Area 1960s and '70s counterculture-alternative schools, extended families, political activism, interracial mixing-and its decline into 1980s and '90s street violence, crack dealing, racial unrest and economic belt-tightening. A self-styled ""army brat"" of Caucasian and Cherokee descent, she was a divorced single mother and civil rights and peace activist in the mid-'60s. She discovered Buddhist meditation while recovering from a rock-climbing accident. Joining a multicultural Berkeley community group, Chavis worked with police to eliminate drug dealing from her neighborhood. She lost one sister to overdrinking and helped her surviving sister overcome cocaine addiction. Her highly personal accounting of her effort to reconcile Buddhist compassion with legal work and social activism makes this an unusual, challenging document. (Apr.)