Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia

by Leslie Brody

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781886913158
Publisher:	Ruminator Books
Publication date:	08/01/1998
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.04(w) x 8.95(h) x 0.63(d)

Editorial Reviews

A self-critical but refreshingly unrepentant memoir of '60s radicalism. Born in 1952, Brody grew up in working-class Riverhead and Massapequa, New York (her father ran þa five-acre auto- wrecking yardþ), before acquiring the sex, drugs, and rock 'nþ roll credentials of her older contemporaries: she tripped in the Haight, took in Woodstock, jetted to Europe on Icelandic Air, and smoked hash in Amsterdam. All of this she recounts with good humor, capturing the seize-the-day spirit of the times with an easy grace. Writing of the aftermath of the Kent State shootings, for instance, she recalls an invitation by a young hipster to share his sleeping bag before a demonstration: þIn that eve-of-battle atmosphere, I thought, why not? If they use live ammunition tomorrowþI could die a virgin.þ She also spent time on the fringes of the Left, arguing with her old-guard radical father over Vietnam and logging time with the White Panther Party (from which she earned the designation þRed Star Sisterþ). As she puts it: þI was moving spasmodically, from plot point to plot point, like a character in a melodrama.þ All these experiences mark the turmoil and idealism to which her subtitle alludes, and she writes of them skillfully and without self-indulgence. Although she clearly rues some of the rhetorical (and the daily) excesses of the New Left, Brody refuses to follow the path of David Horowitz and other '60s rebels-turned-rightists. þBy telling you this story of the war years in terms of my own life,þ she instead volunteers, þI hope to salvage some sense of the utopianism and the complicated vision of country andself that dazzled so many of us in the age we held in common.þ Casually convincing sentences and a steadfast memory make this a representative memoir of a troubled era.

Kirkus Reviews