Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (Paperback)

by Susan Braudy (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
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 Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (November 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400077486
• ISBN-13: 978-1400077489
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #942,218 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A poorly written and edited history of the Boudin family, February 8, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (Hardcover)

I've noticed that there are some factual inaccuracies in this book. For instance, the shooting of NYC police officer Joseph Piagentini outside a housing project in Harlem on May 21, 1971 is conflated with the machine gunning and maiming of NYC Patrolmen Currie and Binetti on Riverside Drive two nights before. Piagentini wasn't machine-gunned to death. Tupac Shakur is listed as having been killed in 1994 and in 1996 on the same page! Such errors make me wonder if there aren't any other factual inaccuracies in the book.

Braudy is fair to both sides, and her rendition of the period leading up to and including the Brinks armored car robbery and its aftermath is the highlight of the book. Her psychobiography of the Boudin family wears thin after a while, however, and it would have been better if she'd stayed away from an omniscient narrator style in developing her thesis. What I got from the book was that while Boudin shared her father's commitment to radical causes, she was also a somewhat indulged child who rejected her father's cherished legalisms in favor of violence in the cause of the "revolution". Braudy should also have tried to show how Boudin's metamorphosis from Bryn Mawr student to bomb-throwing member of the Weathermen was emblematic of other children of privilege who were drawn to the New Left in the U.S. and in Europe during the late 1960s.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disorganized depression, January 30, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (Hardcover)

I have to agree with the reviewer who pointed out that the enthusiastic reviews were from NY, NY. Maybe if you knew some of the people in this book, it would be easier to follow. As it is, it seems a string of loosely-connected anecdotes without much to frame it. The people in this tale are, for the most part, unpleasant and depressing. The father is a narcissistic womanizer, the "heroine" Kathy is a narcissistic rebel. They seem to deserve each other. The only sympathetic characters are the sad, brave, repressed mother, and the hapless little boy that Kathy left with a baby-sitter while she went with a group of cocaine addicts to pull an armed robbery.

In addition to the lack of any strong central figure that a reader could care about, the book is bady written and even more badly organized. The writer doesn't seem to believe in transitions between paragraphs -- you may get an anecdote about Kathy's life in prison, followed by a paragraph about her great-uncle's opinions of America, then a paragraph or so about her now-grown son visiting a friend in jail.

Pictures are flung on the pages without any particular relevance to anything in the text. The pictures are also in no order -- I was ready to give up when I saw a picture of a bombed building from 1972, and a few pages later another one from 1970, and then one from 1971. One of the last pictures is a 1942 painting of the trial of John Brown, with a remark that Kathy admired him! Were there no actual pictures from the oh-so-dramatic 1970s and 80s that could actually illustrate the story purportedly being told?

There are some nuggests in here, but you have to do a lot of panning to find them.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, flawed study of a terrorist, October 26, 2004

By	Jery Tillotson "author" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this study of the colorful, unconventional Boudin family. I agree with other readers that there was too much space given to the father, Leonard Boudin, an intense, civil rights attorney, who specialized in representing the radical left. So it's not surprising that his daughter, Kathy Boudin, became a radical protestor of the Vietnam War and a loud, snarling member of the Weather Underground. While other members of this pathetic group finally threw in the towel and turned themselves into the law after careers as bombers, killers and trouble-makers, Kathy Boudin stuck it out. You read in horrified fascination how she became a key member of the killers who murdered two police officers in a foiled Brinks truck armed robbery. Even behind bars for 21 years, she played the role of wronged martyr. I remember during the sixties, when the Weather Underground was at its peak of fury. My college roommate dubbed them, The Marx Brothers of Terrorism. He hit the nail on the head. No one knew really what these rich, wealthy white kids were protesting. None had ever worked anywhere in their lives. Even when they supposedly went underground, their wealthy parents and friends supported them and gave them safe houses. Yet, you caught occasional glimpses of them on television as they shrieked and cursed and acted like lunatics. In their own pathetic little reality, they dramatized themselves as great revolutionaries who would foment a nation wide revolution to destroy America's values. No one knew what they wanted to replace them with.