Customer Reviews

Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

This is a very thorough account of the lives of the Boudins and of those connected with them. Some readers may not want all that detail. I personally found it very engaging, especially since I knew (not well) both the author and the book's subject at school. I continue to be fascinated by Kathy Boudin's life, now that she is a professor at Columbia University.

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.

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.

While Leonard Boudin's solipsism and legal chicanery certainly left an indelible impression on the pathetic Kathy, it's all the more remarkable that Michael Boudin - so skilled as a judge he was appointed by Bush 41 to the DC Court of Appeals - has virtually escaped the leftist hellhole.

A remarkable feat, that.

Also, Brody's casual mention of Diana Oughton and Kathy skinning and eating a stray cat was, to put it very mildly, horrific.

I read this book when it came out and, so help me, I loved it. It was a fun, fast read about a highly dysfunctional family on a topic (70s radicals) that has long fascinated me. Recently I saw the documentary The Weather Underground and read Jeremy Varon's Bringing the War Home, which lead me to reread Family Circle.

I first heard about Kathy Boudin at the time of the Brinks Robbery. The outline of her story fascinated me: nice, middle-class white girl goes "underground" and fights for "black liberation." All the nice middle-class white girls in my middle school probably thought "black liberation" had something to do with wearing black clothing in the summertime. (The 80s were a little low on political consciousness) I couldn't find out much about Kathy Boudin at the time so when this book came out - by an author whose This Crazy Thing Called Love I'd enjoyed - I pre-ordered it and I wasn't disappointed.

It would be easy to see Family Circle as an indictment of "the aristocracy of the Left". Maybe that's even what Braudy intended but it didn't come across that way to me. In fact, I don't buy the argument that their politics was part of the problem at all. Change the politics from left to right (make Leonard Boudin an arch-conservative and make Kathy an abortion clinic bomber, for instance) and the bare outlines of the story remain the same. Disengaged parents, two children who rebel in their ways in an effort to get their attention. Dad's a serial adulterer, Mom's a sometimes adulterer and more often times mental patient. Where Michael Boudin takes the more traditional route of embracing the exact opposite of what motivates his parents, Kathy tries to be lefter than thou.

And there were times in the book when I could see her point: while Leonard is talking a good game and reveling in the notoriety his famous cases bring him (like representing Cuba), Kathy lives her commitment (she spends a summer harvesting sugar cane in Cuba). Braudy doesn't leave any doubt that Kathy was driven at least as much by her passionate desire to improve the lives of the less fortunate than by her desire to be taken seriously by her father. She also shows Kathy exchanging one futile cause for another - achieving world revolution isn't any easier than getting Leonard to stop hitting on her girlfriends long enough to pay attention to her.

Kathy also exchanges one set of non-affirming authority figures (her parents) for another (the Weather Underground leadership, the BLA leadership) with the result that she embraces steadily more radical, more "heavy" positions out of proportion to the task at hand. Want to prove to Daddy and Sekou and the Weathermen that you're a revolutionary? Go bomb a dance at an army base. That'll show 'em. By the time of the Brinks Robbery Kathy has all but surrendered her free will to anyone who'll give her a sufficiently radical task to perform. There's something noxious about Kathy's contention that only after three people were killed did she make the connection between armed violence and death. This is a smart woman educated at some of the country's finest schools, if she didn't need a Weatherman to tell her how the wind blows she didn't need a map to figure that one out either.

That, of course, is the heart of the tragedy in this story: smart people with many advantages professing to be acting to better the lives of others but can't seem to manage the most basic of personal relationships. Infatuated by the correctness of their beliefs, the Boudins neglect to fulfill the most fundamental aspects of respect and honesty in their relations with each other. That's a recipe for tragedy not matter what the politics of the situation.

As I said, this is an easy, enjoyable read but don't be surprised if you find yourself feeling sad when you've finished it.

This story of a leftist/progressive family and their radical daughter is a microcosm of the intertwining social and political trends that helped shape the 60s. Nice insights into family dynamics and generational friction, the search for "authenticity" (black panthers, bomb-making) by white, middle class kids, and a glimpse of what life was like among the radical fringe. For a West Coast take on the same period, look at Peter Coyote's "Sleeping Where I fall." Both explore the confluence of the personal and the political in a volatile era.

I enjoyed reading this book very much, and recommend it to all readers. It was a fascinating look at Kathy Boudin and those radical student leftists known as the Weather Underground who declared war on America in protest to the Vietnam War.

Kathy Boudin's treachery resulted in the killing of two policemen, for which she served 22 years in prison. That may not matter to the leftist readers who have given this finely written book low ratings. Ignore their hateful rantings, and judge for yourself how a bright young woman of privledge could make such a bad choice to pursue terrorist goals.

Kathy left her baby with a sitter to drive a getaway van full of Black Panthers who robbed a Brink's armored truck, and actually expected to return on time to pick up her child! Instead, she was captured after the two policemen were killed, and her child was abandoned.

The picture on p. 353 of one of the Weathermen stomping on an American flag gives the reader an indication that these radical leftists have no remorse for their past behavior.

There is ample material on the internet concerning how leftists were able to get Kathy released on parole in 2003. Her victims left behind families that will never forget her treachery.

Susan Braudy seems to believe everything anyone told her simply because they said it, the more grotesque the better. Often she attributes one assertion in a paragraph to a source, letting the reader assume that other allegations nearby also come from the same place. Lots of small,irritating errors. Her historical and political analysis boils down to family rivalries--what about the war in Vietnam?

It's a shame such an interesting and important story should be so awkwardly written and so badly researched. I'm waiting for another author to carefully write the book that this period of time in our history deserves. There are so many inaccuracies in time and place that one cannot trust the writer.