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Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left Kindle Edition

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 17 ratings

Product description

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 the hardcover edition.

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 the hardcover edition.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00PUMS28K
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (Oct. 29 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 7510 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 491 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1400077486
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 17 ratings

About the author

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Susan Braudy is a Pulitzer nominated author, journalist, and former Vice President of East Coast Production at Warner Brothers. She was one of the first editors of the student/faculty magazine The New Journal at Yale. She's currently a member of that magazine's advisory board. She is best known as the author of two non-fiction books, Between Marriage and Divorce: A Woman's Diary (1975) and Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (2003).

She received a Cum Laude degree from Bryn Mawr College in the early 1960s, then attended University of Pennsylvania and Yale University (where she studied philosophy).

Braudy's father worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and actively supported local artists. He was Vice President of the American Jewish Committee. His Master's thesis at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania became the book Technological Unemployment, an early look at how advances in technology were replacing human labor. He also wanted to be a writer and Braudy believes this may be the reason she became a writer. Braudy's mother taught history at Germantown High School and became a reading supervisor. Braudy now lives with Joe Weintraub and two dogs, Tootsie and Snickers.

Braudy has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine and The New Journal. She has also taught writing at Brooklyn College.

She was a judge for the 2006 Lukas Prize, an award from the Columbia University Journalism School given annually to recognize excellence in book-length investigative journalism.

In 1981, Braudy was appointed as the Vice President of East Coast Production at Warner Brothers. She also worked as Vice President of Michael Douglas's Stonebridge Production Company for three years from 1986-1989. She was hired by Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Bruckheimer, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone to write screenplays.

Her research for a piece on paperback auctions, published in The New York Times, was used by the Federal Trade Commission to institute and win an anti-trust suit against the high-bidder in a multimillion dollar paperback rights auction.

Her two blogs are Manhattan Voyeur and Writers Celebrate Writing.

She counts as her mentors Gloria Steinem, who encouraged her to express her female voice; Daniel Yergin, who taught her the value of infinite research; Michael Douglas, who taught her that glamor isn't glamorous; Michael Wolff, who taught her the music of the New York hustle; Marshall Brickman, who taught her about heartbreak on the fast track; Woody Allen, who taught her his artistic credo, "Turn pain into cash"; and Leo Braudy, who gave her Joan Didion's personal essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
17 global ratings

Top reviews from Canada

Reviewed in Canada on November 3, 2003
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Ken Braun
5.0 out of 5 stars Grounded and informative
Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2022
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2017
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Ron Nutter
5.0 out of 5 stars interesting read
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2014
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reviewer
3.0 out of 5 stars Great story, weak writing
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2019
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cacoethes scribendi
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating...and highly revealing, at that
Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2012
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