Ravens in the storm : a personal history of the 1960s antiwar movement /

WHEN circumstances throw a child into the company of a stranger, do you wish for that stranger to be male or female? What would the child prefer? In Harry Mulisch's novel "The Assault," a young Dutch boy is separated from his parents at the end of World War II, after members of the underground assassinate a collaborator outside the family home. Alone and afraid, he is taken to a police station and pushed into a dark cell. "All about him he could feel the presence of the man who must be in there somewhere." When a voice in the blackness says, "Why are you here?" relief washes over him. Why? Because it is "the gentle voice of a woman. Suddenly it was as if a great danger had been averted." As the woman pulls him close to console him, the boy smells sweat and something strangely sweet - perfume, he thinks. But it's blood. The woman who comforts him is one of thetassassins, a "terrorist" in the words Of the soldiers who imprisoned her. Her actions led to the death of the boy's parents, but he doesn't know that, nor does she. Still, as she holds him, he hears "her heart pound, really much too hard for someone who was just comforting someone else." Years later, he sobs when he learns she has died: "She was resurrected together with all she had meant to him, hidden there in the darkness." This idea, this truth - that a child in distress is hard-wired to seek protection from a woman, any woman, whatever her failings, her confusions, her ideology - is the heartbeat that races through Peter Carey's enthralling new novel, "His Illegal Self," a book as psychologically taut as a Patricia Highsmith thriller and as starkly beautiful as Mulisch's modern classic. Carey's protagonist is a 7-year-old boy named Che Selkirk (called "Jay" by his starchy Park Avenue grandmother), born in 1965 to radicalized Ivy Leaguers. After his mother stumbles during a protest against Robert McNamara at Harvard and rolls under a car in the motorcade, the 1-year-old Che clutched to her chest like a football, Grandma Selkirk takes over her grandson's care. After Che's mother robs a bank in Bronxville, Grandma gets permanent custody of the child, resolving to "bring him up Victorian. It was better than 'all this.' " Meanwhile, Che's mother goes underground. Inevitably, the characters evoke storied figures from the counterculture - Che Guevara and the socialist revolution, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, Diana Oughton and her West Village basement bomb factory. From this, Carey takes a daring imaginative leap: What if Patty Hearst, on the run with the S.L.A., had had a baby in her arms, along with her machine gun? What if the town house where Oughton and her fellow Weatherman Terry Robbins blew themselves up had had a nursery on a higher floor? Can you midwife the revolution and raise a child at the same time? On the day the book begins, Che's sheltered life of doormen, museum visits, country house retreats and spinsterly games of ludo comes to an end. The elevator to his grandmother's apartment opens upon a defiant young hippie, come to collect him. Beholding her, Che is "deaf, in love," dazzled. "He had thought of her so many nights and here she was, exactly the same, completely different - honeycolored skin and tangled hair in 15 shades. She had Hindu necklaces, little silver bells around her ankles, an angel sent by God." When he asks her, "Can I call you Mom?" she responds, "You can call me Dial." Dial is short for "dialectic." A self-styled "S.D.S. goddess," Dial has just become an assistant professor in the English department at Vassar, but she's still caught in the ideological web of the Movement, "although what the Movement was by 1972 depended on whom you were talking to." As the boy looks at the unknown woman, "adoringly," giving her "little glances, smiles," she thinks "how glorious it was to be loved, she, Dial, who was not loved by anyone. She felt herself just absorb this little boy, his small damp hand dissolving in her own." Where does Dial want to take Che, and is it for the Movement or for herself? She doesn't know, and Che's entrenched WASP code keeps him from questioning her too closely: "It was his upbringing, to 'not say.' " Still, even as you worry about what kind of guardian Dial will make, it's hard not to share in Che's exhilaration as he takes the hand of the woman he regards as his liberator: "Slippery together as newborn goats," they rush down a subway stairwell to meet messengers of the Movement. "Giddy, giggling," Che exults at his freedom: "They had entered another planet, and as they pushed down to the platform the ceiling was slimed with alien rust and the floor was flecked and speckled with black gum - so this was the real world that had been crying to him from beneath the grating up on Lex." The real world turns out to be mightily uncomfortable: first the Port Authority, then Philadelphia, where a bomb blast propels them to further flight. They travel to the West Coast, where callous ideologues from the Movement give them money and plane tickets to make them go away. They wind up in Australia, where Dial buys a hideout on the muggy, overgrown edge of the Queensland jungle - two grimy huts infested with black flies and bats. Their nearest neighbors are uptight, self-righteous hippies and coarse rogues. To the West Coast hippies, Dial had seemed "petit bourgeois"; to the Aussies, she's "twitchy and sarcastic." Even Che baits her. With each new encounter, Carey gives weight and heft to the concept of class struggle, showing that the conflict occurs not just between groups but among individuals, even within a single person. "You want to live an Alternative Lifestyle," an Australian criminal named Trevor mocks Dial as he commandeers her savings. "She had a degree from Harvard," she thinks, as if that means anything in the wilds of Queensland. "He couldn't speak or spell." Dial knows that if she and Che are to survive, they must make peace with their hostile environs, but when Trevor and Che forge a friendship, jealousy consumes her, and she's "hurt by his reticence." Che is all she has, but is he even hers? As always with Carey, Australia provides a staging ground for primordial forces. While Dial labors to preserve their walls and her freedom, the boy labors to understand his new circumstances, unaware that ideology has orphaned him. Nursing fantasies that his father, whom he's never met, will rescue him, he asks Dial, "How can my dad ever find us now?" He's intelligent enough, in spite of his youth, to sense that Trevor is dangerous, that Dial is clueless, and that he is in an untenable position: "It was absolutely clear, even to a boy, that the mother could not take care of him. She had no idea of where she was or what she'd taken on." In their hut, over a game of cards, Che feels "a cloud of sadness settle on them both, like bugs around a lamp." What will become of them? Will the neighbors turn violent? Will Dial get arrested? Will Che make it out of the wilderness before he's forgotten how to play ludo? Put another way: Will the kid be all right? IN "His Illegal Self," Peter Carey draws as much magic from the muslin of contemporary speech as he has previously from the lustrous velvet of his more fanciful prose. This novel marks a departure - an altogether successful one - for the versatile author, who usually paints gorgeous whorls of story around outlandish figures from the untouchable past, real or imagined: gamblers and dreamers, circus freaks, outlaws, prodigals and passionate eccentrics. Here, the world he inhabits the protest movement of the '60s and '70s - is both familiar and recent. Arguably, it lives on, remembered in every campus protest, every new burst of civic activism. You might think this would constrain Carey's creative powers, but if anything, it has concentrated them. His backdrop is no less exotic for its realism, and his close portrait of the relationship between one benighted woman and the child who depends on her is exquisite, enlarging the story beyond the frame of its epoch. The personal is political, Dial might say, and Che is that statement's living proof. "The executive will not support this, Dial," a Movement representative tells her early on, refusing Dial and the boy shelter. But Dial can't think of Che as "this." To her, Che is "him" - a person. "She thinks the revolution is a part-time job," someone else sneers. Dial is neither a full-time revolutionary nor a full-time child-minder; she's just a woman who learns too late that there's no practical way to combine the two jobs, but whose conscience won't let her sacrifice either one. What if Patty Hearst, on the run with the S.L.A., had a baby in her arms, along with her machine gun? Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

In 1963, Oglesby was a 29-year-old copywriter for a Michigan-based defense contractor. He was married, had three young children, and looked ahead to a comfortable, middle-class life. As a part-time student at the University of Michigan, he was exposed to the radical politics of the recently formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As the war in Vietnam intensified, Oglesby was drawn into the antiwar movement and was elected president of the SDS in 1965. However, his account of his experiences in the movement is not a predictable radical rant. He consistently viewed himself as a radical centrist who sought accommodation with liberals and even conservatives who had doubts about the war. His memoir is filled with fascinating, sometimes moving, and sometimes comical episodes, including his testimony at the Chicago Eight trial. For those who lived though the era and younger readers who want to understand it, this work will be a treasure.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2007 Booklist

Enjoying the security and comfort of his middle-class lifestyle in the suburbs of Ann Arbor, Mich., where he worked for a defense contractor, Oglesby was an unlikely candidate to move to the forefront of the countercultural antiwar movement. However, several momentous events, combined with his growing sense that the Vietnamese revolution had less to do with communism and more to do with national independence, led him to quit his job and follow his principles by becoming involved full-time in the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society. Oglesby traces his and the organization's activities from its attempts to educate the public on Vietnam at "teach-ins" through the more violent antiwar activities of its splinter groups. His insider's view introduces readers to the personalities and ideologies of some of the major players in SDS and the antiwar movement, and he uses recently released FBI, State Department and CIA files to show the magnitude of governmental infiltration of the organization. But what makes the book most compelling is Oglesby's in-depth knowledge of this tumultuous era and his astute observations about the influence of key events of the period-such as the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy as well as military operations like the Tet offensive-on SDS and its evolving political ideology. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Oglesby (New Left Reader), a freelance writer and former activist, provides an engrossing memoir of his involvement in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The largest and most famous (and infamous) student activist organization of the 1960s, SDS attracted Oglesby primarily because he saw it as a means of opposing the Vietnam War. Somewhat older than most activists of the time, in 1965 he left his job at the Bendix Corporation (where he had a top-secret classification) and spent the next five years as a key member of the SDS leadership, serving as president in 1965-66 and as a leading advocate of nonviolent approaches to opposing the war. Oglesby writes of reaching out to liberal organizations and politicians in the hope of establishing a broad coalition for change and reveals fascinating details of the group's inner workings. Scorned by radical revolutionaries in the group (e.g., Bernadine Dorhn), he was excommunicated from it as the Sixties ended and his memoir comes to a close. Fine prose and revealing details highly recommend this for academic and most public libraries.--Anthony Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Maybe you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows--in, say, the middle of a cyclone. Enter Oglesby (Who Killed JFK?, 1991, etc.), revolutionary, enemy of the people and evenhanded chronicler of days past. When the '60s writ large began around 1964, Oglesby was working as a technical writer for a defense contractor, occasionally bemused by his bosses' attitudes--they drank a congratulatory toast when JFK gave way to LBJ, sure that war profits were soon to increase--but mostly content to keep his head down. The defense work wasn't far-fetched: Oglesby points out early on that the anti-war movement wasn't pacifist or anti-war as such, just anti-Vietnam, which to everyone but just those profiteers looked like a bad idea from the beginning. Contentment gave way to gnawing doubts, and Oglesby, by now involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), found himself in South Vietnam--not bearing arms, but gathering information for the growing anti-war movement, learning from the opposition there, anticommunist and anti-American at once, that Vietnam needed two things: to be free and to be rich. Though Oglesby rose to prominence in the SDS and the anti-war movement, as he charts here, he did not adapt, in the end, to the rise of the New Left and its doctrinaire ways. Toward the end of the book, we find him facing a self-styled people's tribunal, courtesy of the Weather Underground, for the crime of having "sat on a panel with the fascist pig Herman Kahn." Oglesby's elegy for the sensible opposition, replaced by a different version of SDS and its antiwar kin in which just about every second person was an undercover cop or informant, makes useful reading for activists today. A worthy complement to Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS, Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, David Maraniss's They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967 and other tales of the movement. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.