Groovy, Man

Groovy, Man is a compellingly psycho-historical memoir chronicling the extraordinary life of David Tussman. As a young man he searches for his identity in the shadow of his father, a formidable yet discouraged educational reformer, and his mother, a frustrated intellectual. By way of making sense of his own experience, carefully crafted excerpts from his parents’ eloquent writings provide nuanced insights into some of the ambitions and quandaries of the Greatest Generation.

Breaking out of a repressed childhood and a nearly debilitating shyness, Tussman seeks fulfillment through political activism, drug dealing, working for Greenpeace, and serial romantic entanglements, finally finding stability in an unconventional arrangement of his personal and professional life. Along the way he encounters a raft of remarkable personalities—political activists, underground drug dealers, and environmental heroes—and fosters enduring friendships that survived, or were made possible by, the bedlam that characterized the era.  

Mordantly funny, highly readable, and entertaining from first to last, Groovy, Man has a “you are there” quality that invites readers to experience—or relive—an astonishing cultural period in American life.

David Tussman was born in 1946 in Berkeley, California, and came of age during the blossoming of 1960s counterculture. After an excursion into the psychedelic underground, he attended law school and worked as Greenpeace’s attorney during its turbulent founding days. Along the way, he survived four marriages and started a software company, which he continues to operate from its base in Oakland, California.