When Kathy Boudin was arrested in 1981 after a botched armed robbery and shootout that left a Brinks guard and two policemen dead, she ended a decade living underground as part of the radical Weathermen underground; she would spend the next 22 years in Bedford Hills prison. In Family Circle , Boudin’s former classmate Susan Braudy vividly re-creates the radicalization of this intelligent, privileged young woman who came from one of the most prominent liberal intellectual families in America. She illuminates Boudin’s relationship with her parents --and particularly with her father Leonard, a famous leftist lawyer--and shows how Kathy, swept up in the ferment of the late 1960s, moved further and further from the Old Left ideals they embodied. Based on extensive interviews, court documents, and Boudin family papers, Family Circle is both a rich biography of a family and a intimate window into a turbulent and fascinating time. “A gripping study. . . . A powerful narrative.” --The New York Times Book Review “Tough-minded, honest, and thoroughly absorbing.” -- The New Republic “The tensions, conflicts, and eventual downfall of a seemingly confident dynasty of radical tinkers and super-achievers . . . give Susan Braudy’s Family Circle its stunning power. . . . As Braudy tells it, the story attains the epic stature of a genuine American tragedy.” -- The Women’s Review of Books “Fascinating . . . Braudy, who knew Kathy growing up, delves deeply into her family’s crippling psychological games.” – People “Rethinks what makes a radical tick." -- New York Daily News In 1970, Kathy Boudin, revolutionary Weatherman, fled the ruins of a town house on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village after a bomb that was being made there exploded, killing three people, and America?s sympathy with radicalism fell apart. The Weathermen had started as angry kids who planted stink bombs and emulated the Black Panthers, but the bomb they were building on Eleventh Street was deadly. Kathy, daughter of the celebrated lawyer Leonard Boudin, third generation of the famous Boudin family, emerged naked from the wreckage, was given some clothes by a neighbor, slipped into the night, and went underground for the next eleven years, her name soon appearing on the FBI?s 10 Most Wanted List. Susan Braudy tells the riveting story of the Boudin family circle through four generations. She writes of Kathy Boudin?s childhood, growing up in Manhattan in an ambitious, liberal New York Jewish family, daughter of a revered left-wing labor and civil liberties lawyer and an intellectual poet mother. Braudy writes of Kathy?s parents; her father, Leonard, who patterned his life after that of his uncle, the great labor lawyer and leftist legal scholar, Louis B. Boudin (in the 1930s he fought in court for new laws to protect and organize labor unions and was one of the foremost translators and interpreters of Karl Marx). Leonard Boudin fought on behalf of dissenters on the left. He argued the cases of Paul Robeson and the two-time convicted spy Judith Coplon before the Supreme Court, forcing the U.S. government to allow free travel to all citizens and preventing the admission of illegally gathered evidence, rulings that crucially curtailed the power of J. Edgar Hoover. Braudy writes of Boudin?s legal work on behalf of such clients as Rockwell Kent and Julian Bond; his defense of Fidel Castro in connection with his seizure of American capital in Cuba; his case on behalf of Dr. Benjamin Spock (arrested for protesting the Vietnam War; Boudin put the war, not Dr. Spock, on trial); and his case on behalf of Daniel Ellsberg, helping him to leak the Pentagon Papers, which set the stage for Nixon?s resignation. We see Kathy?s mother, Jean Boudin, poet and intellectual, an orphan taken in by a cultivated Jewish family whose circle included Marc Blitzstein and Clifford Odets; her courtship and marriage to Leonard (they were toasted as ?the most gorgeous couple of the left?); her years as the dutiful, devoted wife to a husband who conducted countless affairs; her suicide attempt when Kathy was nine. And we see Leonard?s lifelong mentor and competitor?his brother-in-law, the brilliant, scrappy independent journalist and government critic I. F. Stone, a born leader and fighter who made war on government bureaucrats (believing they usurped power) and on his deadly enemy, J. Edgar Hoover. We follow Kathy at Bryn Mawr, organizing the school?s maids to demand fair wages, graduating magna cum laude in the top five of her class; failing to get into Yale Law School (while her brother was a star at Harvard); helping to plan the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the ?Days of Rage? that followed; breaking Black Panther Assata Shakur out of jail; bombing the headquarters of the Manhattan Police Department and the Capitol in Washington; and finally, in 1981, being part of the botched robbery of a Brinks truck that turned into a bloodbath (