Kathy Boudin and the dance of death /

A brief yet rambling essay/report on Kathy Boudin, underground-radical and prominent defendant in the Brink's/Nyack case--by the self-indulgent, shrilly feminist author of Vaginal Politics. Frankfort begins with a loose reconstruction of the hours just after the robbery and killings in October 1981, focusing (with grating sentimentality) on Mary La Ports, the girlfriend of one of the slain policemen. Then comes, along with digressive personal anecdotes, an argumentative, often near-incoherent chapter on ""Kathy Before Brink's"": her 1960s college radicalism; her involvement with the splintering SDS and the Weathermen, failing to use her ""shit detector system"" to reject the radicals' chauvinism (""they treated us like cunts. . . I mean, you didn't even have to be female to recognize the bullshit""); the Eleventh Street bomb, sending the surviving Weathermen into hiding; and Boudin's 1970s underground life as radical and unwed mother, part of the ""macho female Left"" which Frankfort loathes so passionately. (Cf. Jane Alpert's Growing Up Underground, 1981.) Next: a heavily sarcastic description of defense/PR efforts by Boudin's famous lawyer-father Leonard after Brink's. (""Had Kathy not been so consistently singled out, bad Leonard not. . . tried to argue that her incarceration was due to her fame, and had he been a bit more civil to members of the working press, negative feelings against the Boudins would probably not have run as high as he claimed they do."") And finally Frankfort takes 20 pages to ask What Went Wrong. ""She could have been a thrilling leader of the feminist revolution. Why did she choose to pursue the violent macho idea of revolution instead?"" The dubious answer: the gap between chauvinist Leonard's ""personal behavior and his idealistic politics. . . Kathy and other women of her generation who turned to violence. . . were faced with a kind of schizophrenia in the culture of their parents' generation."" Many of Frankfort's anti-Boudin comments have a kernel of validity; and there's definitely the potential for an absorbing socio-psychological study in the Kathy Boudin case. But this sketchy, narrow, frequently puerile hodgepodge isn't it--not by a long shot. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.