From Publishers Weekly
When Kathy Boudin walked out of prison recently after serving 20 years of a 20-year-to-life sentence, it was front-page news and an eerie echo of a rapidly receding era. Boudin had been an accomplice in a notorious 1981 Brinks robbery by the Black Liberation Army in which one Brinks guard and two police officers were killed. Boudin's release was an odd reminder of a time when revolution was in the air and some, namely Boudin's Weather Underground, thought they could bring it by violence. Braudy (Who Killed Sal Mineo? etc.), who knew Boudin at college in the early '60s, sees the Boudin "family circle" as revolving around the father-daughter dyad of Leonard and Kathy, locked in a love-hate relationship that involved a fierce need by each for the other's approval and an equally fierce need to outradicalize the other. Leonard was a celebrated leftist lawyer whose clients included Dr. Benjamin Spock, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ellsberg. But Kathy insisted, according to Braudy, that she was the one who would end the war in Vietnam and bring racial equality through her guerrilla tactics. It's an unpleasant, even suffocating tale: Leonard comes off as preening and self-regarding, a chronic seducer of young women; Kathy as arrogant and rigidly ideological, scolding anyone who wouldn't join her revolution. But in reducing Kathy's radical motivations to a battle with her father, Braudy offers a thin portrait with no resonance and no emotional toehold for the reader-no one in this sad story appears sympathetic in Braudy's portrayal; Kathy's mother, clearly deserving sympathy, is only a shadowy bit player. Braudy's is a small account of events and people meriting a broader, larger-spirited chronicle.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Kathy Boudin, former member of the radical Weather Underground who was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List for 11 years, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her part in the 1980 Brink's robbery, which resulted in the death of two police officers and a security guard. Braudy, who met Boudin at Bryn Mawr, offers a revealing look at the Boudin family--three generations of political activists and thinkers. Her father, Leonard, intense and driven, was a respected civil liberties attorney. Kathy's mother, Jean, was a poet and intellectual, so slavishly devoted to Leonard that she ignored his affairs with young women. Kathy's relationship with her family was deeply troubled; she vied with her brother for the attention of a father who was absorbed in his own image. Kathy, in effect, competed with her father for headlines--he with sensational court battles, she with plans for bombings and protests. Based on FBI files, court transcripts, and interviews, Braudy details the turbulent social and political atmosphere of the 1960s when Kathy associated with radicals including Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman. She also vividly recalls the radical counterculture that eschewed material comforts, advocated "smash monogamy" with group sex, and heavily used drugs. Boudin's recent parole will heighten interest in this compelling look at a major figure in American radical politics and domestic terrorism.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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