The Last of Her Kind (2005)

Naive Georgette wants to escape a stingy childhood of emotional and financial want and precocious Ann wants to obliterate the guilt she feels about her privileged upbringing when the two meet as Barnard College roommates in 1968. In chronicling the lifelong relationship that ensues between the two — sometimes as closest friends, sometimes as critics of each other's trial-and-error experiments in idealism — Sigrid Nunez teaches an honors-level survey course in the sexual, political, and cultural movements that shaped the thinking (and rocked the world) of so many boomer women. Nunez's voice is unflinching and intimate, her novelistic structure as invitingly informal as jottings in a journal; the suggested background music with which to read The Last of Her Kind might be Peter, Paul & Mary singing ''Wasn't That a Time.''