Red Star Sister : Between Madness and Utopia [Paperback]

Leslie Brody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2000

Brody looks back at her odyssey from an awkward adolescence on Long Island to paramilitary training in Chicago and communal living in Ann Arbor, among other events in her life, as she chronicles coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There are fascinating moments in this memoir of a young woman living during the 1960s counterculture, but Brody takes herself so seriously that she often sabotages her own undertaking with ponderous commentary. She compares a tough first-grade teacher to Nixon, because "[n]either could tolerate opposition, and both were determined to crush dissent." At her suburban high school in the late 1960s, Brody and a friend who also had long hair were hair-sprayed by primmer students. "Their intent," she writes, "was to immobilize our hair and, by extension, our minds." Once she'd graduated from high school, Brody hit the road, ending up at a communal house in Chicago with the White Panther Party, where she was the token feminist yet still expected to do the dishes. After a short stint in Ann Arbor, Mich., she boarded an old school bus with a group bound for Pittsburgh, Pa. Claiming to have few memories of that trip, she offers verbatim journal entries instead. If Brody's retrospective voice can be heavy-handed, her youthful diary has no sense of irony whatsoever, although this earnest chapter does have a few humorous moments ("NOTE TO MYSELF. Never take hallucinogens in a police station again!"). Brody continued to write for alternative papers, putting out a column under the name Buckwheat Groats, and eventually she headed to Europe, where she hoped to show up at the Paris peace talks and end the Vietnam War. Brody certainly had her share of fascinating experiences, and for the most part this is a smooth read, but even now, with years of hindsight, she seems at a loss to say what those experiences meant.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Brody (ed., Daughters of Kings, Faber & Faber, 1997) elegantly chronicles her life as a young woman from a Long Island suburb who came of age during the Vietnam War. Recounting her journey into the Sixties counterculture of antiwar demonstrations, Woodstock, participation in the White Panther Party, and presence at the Paris peace talks, Brody conveys "some sense of the utopianism and the complicated vision of country and self that dazzled so many of us in the age we held in common" with crisp writing and captivating honesty. She neither glorifies her life nor hesitates to reveal both the courageous and foolish aspects of her choices. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.?Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ruminator Books (August 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1886913153
• ISBN-13: 978-1886913158
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,811,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Red Star Sister is Good, December 12, 2001

By 

A.M.D. (Redlands, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Star Sister : Between Madness and Utopia (Paperback)

Leslie Brody's autobiography recounts her young life as an activist at the height of the counterculture movement, giving readers the inside scoop on the life of a radical hippie. With the body count for the Vietnam War on Cronkite as her background music, Brody leaves her home in a Long Island suburb to single-handedly save the world. She packs her red suitcase and heads into the unknown, stopping for episodes at White Panther collectives in Chicago and Ann Arbor, Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and finally, Europe, where she hopes to attend the Vietnamese peace negotiations. Its rich detail, humor, and awareness of self and world make Red Star Sister a fascinating memoir.

Brody gives readers a strong sense of the euphoria felt by radicals in the 60's and early 70's. She explains how the goal was to off the pig, and "the fashionable rhetoric encouraged kids not to trust anyone over thirty and, furthermore, to kill our parents". Adults represent the death culture, and hippies idealistically set out to recreate Woodstock all over the world, where love and community would reign over war, napalm, and lies.

Brody's use of detail and allusion is effective in illustrating the counterculture atmosphere. She evokes the music of Phil Ochs and Country Joe McDonald, political role models Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung, and of course, her literary heroes Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, and Anais Nin. With enjoyable candor, she recounts her experiences with hashish, Yellow Sunshine, and free love. Even as a young person born a decade after this time period, I still get a powerful sense of what the world was like for the radicals.

In the midst of revolutionary zeal, however, Brody presents herself as a character with an undeniably human side to which I can relate. She is plagued by concerns that any young woman might experience--"I would wonder if I was a coward," Brody says. She engages in free love still wondering, "Does he just like me because he can have me? Does he even think I'm pretty?... Is it counterrevolutionary to want to be pretty?" I have no problem sympathizing with Brody as she blunders through her early life.

In this tension between counterculture hero and regular girl, Brody holds a naive enthusiasm that manifests itself in a passion for the romantic and the literary. She takes solace as she wanders the streets of France, broke, in the fact that "I felt, despite my discomfort, emotionally pure, careless and thoughtless, down and out, a little crazy, and awfully literary". The irony through which the older Brody frequently views her youthful romanticism adds humor to the narration and conveys a well-rounded sense of self.

Brody's memoir is more outward-looking than what one might expect from an author writing for the "me generation". She admits early on that "I'm sure brats abounded as they do in every age," and presents a balanced account of her youth by describing the bad drug trips along with the good ones. Brody does not proclaim that she and her comrades were the ultimate saviors of society, or that hers was the only valid experience to be had during that time. Instead, she says, "I offer you one woman's point of view". Fortunately, Brody has an interesting perspective and a talent for poignant narration.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Who, What and Why of the Counterculture movement, December 14, 2001

By 

Jeff Thomas (Redlands, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Star Sister : Between Madness and Utopia (Paperback)

This novel is the unequivocal history of both Leslie Brody, and to a larger degree the counterculture movement of the 1960?s and 1970?s. Leslie relives her experiences of many of the major events during this time period including Woodstock, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the underground high school press and the "San Francisco Peace Treaty". With utter fascination at the woman that she was before, Brody goes over her experiences with as much interest into who the girl in the picture and write the poems is.
For the novice Vietnam War reader, or even one who would like to learn what the Vietnam War stood for in the protest marches, there is no better source of information than The Red Star Sister. Without first hand accounts of the actual motives of the protest movement, hippies would be smudged into history as a group full of drugs and free loving. However, this book shows the utopianism that hippies everywhere were seeking, a state that had peace and no need to attack other countries.
Red Star Sister gives a breath of fresh air and reason to the hippie movement and is a must read by all people who did not go through what she has, which is roughly 99% of the population. If you are interested in reading a well-constructed and fair version of events that took place during America's hippie movement, then you must look no further than this book. However, if you ardently believe that the Vietnam War was the correct American foreign policy and the thought of the protest movement makes your stomach curl, then this book should be passed over. Either way, one cannot argue that Leslie Brody lived a truly remarkable life.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Personal Journey Through An Anxious Time, December 13, 2001

By 

S. Johnson (Redlands, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Star Sister : Between Madness and Utopia (Paperback)

Red Star Sister promises no more than "one woman's point of view", a glimpse at a period in our shared history that was marked by turmoil and upheaval, but strife and idealism. This one point of view is more than enough to give the reader what Leslie Brody hopes for, namely a glimpse at an "often shadowy, anxious time", and through the retelling of the events therein, she hopes for herself a chance to recapture the utopian image of self and society that drew her generation together while they were being rived apart by the events of the day.
Brody takes the reader through her childhood on Long Island, replete with insecurity stemming from her middle class upbringing to reprimands for her defiance and intelligence at the local public schools. Through a surprisingly personal and unflinching recounting of her teenage years, through her mother's death, her anger towards her father and the men in her academic life, and her ever increasing political awareness, Brody prepares the reader, through recollections and journal entries, for angst filled state of mind that could take a young hippie girl from Long Island to a White Panther commune in Chicago where she was trained in the art of guerilla warfare, should the ideal for society need to be defended, with force if need be. The ever pressing war in Southeast Asia translated into an intensely individual war at home, as Brody struggles to retain her idealism and even sanity as she comes to grip with her dreams clashing with reality.
In the end what has been offered here is an unapologetic glimpse into the mindset of a woman who shared the life of a generation, without the recriminations or glorifications to be had within the memoirs of contemporaries, done, perhaps, as much for her own sake as that of the reader she takes with her on the journey.