Rating: 
Summary: Her treachery resulted in the killing of two policemen
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating, flawed study of a terrorist
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fall in the Family!
Review: I found "Family Circle" a richly anecdotal and compelling view of a fascinating and complex family that happened to be at the center of radical politics in the U.S. for four decades. Through the patriarchs -- Louis Boudin and his nephew Leonard, and the clients they represented -- I came away with a vivid, though succinct, history of such celebrated causes as the denial of a passport to Paul Robeson, Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, and Benjamin Spock's anti-Vietnam war protests. With Lenoard's brother-in-law Izzy Stone and the mostly leftist New York political and cultural elite of those years in the mix, Braudy deliciously captures their machinations and sexual liaisions. But it is the author's insightful portrayal of the relationship between Leonard Boudin and his daughter Kathy that nailed me. Why such a well-educated and intellectually gifted young women would turn to violence becomes plausible as Braudy unravels the father-daughter dynamics. Perhaps if Braudy had not known Kathy as a classmate at Bryn Mawr and not had access to a candid Jean Boudin, Kathy's mother, the pyschologizing about father and daughter would not be so convincing. But Braudy's argument that Kathy sought her father's attention against stiff odds -- his workoholism, his appreciation of the legal genious his son was becoming, and his womanizing (which often targeted Kathy's friends) -- is strongly presented. Braudy's analysis shows Kathy's descent into violence as the means to not only implement her radical idealogy but to capture her father's attention, even to eventually becoming the kind of client on which he lavished almost every waking hour. This book is also a well investigated look at the workings -- and pathology -- of the Weather Underground. Their strange deprivations, harsh self-criticism, and alternating sexual promiscuity and abstinence makes engrossing reading. Braudy effectively exposes Kathy's (and the surfaced Weathermen's) strategy to downplay her role in '70s bombings and in the Black Liberation Army's murderous Brink's robbery of 1981 that resulted in her incarceration. Even if Braudy sees through the revisionism as a platform for Kathy's parole, she is not judgmental. "Family Circle" has the objective eye of a journalist also giving credit to Kathy's enormous personal strengths and leadership and her pioneering good works in prison.
Rating:
Summary: A must read expose on Kathy Boudin and the bOudin clan
Review: I hate to say it but the real life story of the Boudins reads like a soap opera of the aristocratic left, really gives you a clear idea where moral people fighting for the oppressed really are at, makes you wonder what kind of lives they wish for others since they can't carry on a normal love or family life or abide by the laws that gave them privilege. fascinating and disturbing.
Rating: 
Summary: Disorganized depression
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A poorly written and edited history of the Boudin family
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Pooly Written & Poorly Researched
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Years of Rage
Review: Return, now, to a time long before anyone heard of antiglobalists -- a period when hot-eyed protesters went around smashing windows, setting bombs and fighting police, whom the revolutionaries invariably referred to as "pigs." It was in the '60s and '70s that the Weathermen and fellow travelers embarked on their effort to dismantle the government and the entire system, a mission they deemed central to the world revolution they aspired to lead -- and one far more exciting than the dull activism of the anti-Vietnam War protests, on which they had cut their teeth. They had, indeed, never lived so fully, nor felt so alive, as when they were planning bombings and similar actions, which they designated as "military," while moving from one safe house to another. And, as Susan Braudy makes clear in "Family Circle," her impressive, densely detailed history of one of the leading members of this revolutionary elite, life -- even life on the run -- could be quite empty without the regular infusions of press coverage and other publicity to which they had become accustomed. Planting a mere occasional bomb, as her time on the run continued, could never equal the pleasure given by the activities Kathy Boudin had once relished. The Weathermen had, after all, once made news setting explosives in police stations, National Guard Headquarters, an Army base and even the Pentagon. None of these actions, though, brought a greater sense of triumph than the one Kathy and her closest comrade-in-arms, Bernardine Dohrn, undertook when they set explosives in the first-floor ladies' room of the U.S. Capitol building in 1972 -- a crime, like the previous bombings, for which the group took full credit, in messages issued to the FBI and the press. Getting the credit, indeed, was the whole point. But it was the Capitol bombing that heralded the beginning of a major problem -- that problem being the FBI's new policy, which cannily avoided announcements crediting bombings and similar acts to the Weathermen. The agency let it be known, instead, that the explosions were the work of unidentified "crank groups." To be deprived, thus, of the headlines and publicity that were life and air to the Weathermen was a serious blow to their underground, a major cause of the aimlessness that would becloud Kathy Boudin's life in particular -- a life, Ms. Braudy argues, in no small way driven by a wish to exceed her famous lawyer- father, whose case list of clients included accused spy Judith Coplon, Daniel Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers and Dr. Spock. Whatever the merits of that interpretation, there can be little doubt that Kathy Boudin had determined to make her mark as the most uncompromising of the Movement radicals -- a role that brought her both notoriety and a certain reverence at Bryn Mawr, where, in an otherwise torpid political atmosphere, she harangued fellow students on the inequities of the system. Among those students was Diana Oughton, who would die in 1970 in the Greenwich Village town house that Kathy Boudin's crowd used as a bomb factory. Their road had up to that point been less lethal, though hardly without adventure. In their determination to advance the revolution, Kathy and her crew devoted themselves to the Black Panthers, who were, it turned out, something less than grateful for their attentions. The Weathermen nonetheless proceeded with their plans for a huge 1969 rally, to be held in Chicago and dedicated to the Panthers -- called "Days of Rage." Many aspects of Ms. Braudy's chronicle will evoke the time and atmosphere but none, perhaps, more wonderfully than the preparations for this event, which Kathy Boudin and partners considered a crucial step toward the revolution. They had long schooled themselves in efforts to overthrow bourgeois convention. Diana Oughton, for one, showed her revolutionary ardor by killing and eating an alley cat, among other spiritual tests. Ms. Oughton's career came to a halt a year later in the explosion that splattered a West 11th Street town house with body parts. The bomb under construction there also killed two other of Kathy's comrades, while she and another woman were able to make their way out. From there on in she would live underground. Her life on the run came to an end in 1981, when she agreed to take part in the holdup of a Brink's truck, during which crime the robbers executed the Brink's guard and two police officers. Despite her devoted father's lawyerly efforts, and his (failed) attempts to get her husband and partner in crime to lie and testify to her innocence, she was sentenced to 20 years to life. Some weeks ago, thanks in part to recommendations from notables testifying to her good works, Kathy Boudin -- who continued, amazingly enough, to maintain that she had known nothing about the violent crime in which she had taken part -- was granted parole. Ms. Braudy's history does not stint on the larger, family story central to it and the intense, warped, oddly loving family relationships. The circle consisted of Leonard Boudin, his hapless wife, Jean (a poet and enabler who put up with his lifetime of philandering with a host of young women, including his daughter's friends), and their son, Michael, an intellectual who made his own way early -- an escapee from the family's political tradition -- to become a conservative and distinguished jurist. In this not always satisfactory history fat with sources about which one would like to know more, it is, nevertheless, hard to find a dull moment.
Rating:
Summary: trashy,careless,irresponsible
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: Interesting subject, badly written book
Review: This book has all the flaws of a poorly written biography - unsubstantiated claims to understanding characters' thoughts and motivations, lots of irrelevant details, broad generalizations, inferences treated as facts, and amateur-psychologist diagnoses. Perhaps with serious editing, this could be a decent book. As it is, learning about the people and the times keeps me going, though my annoyance at the author's careless approach to a serious story makes me want to stop. I am not surprised Kathy Boudin did not cooperate.
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