“Those who enjoyed Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle will find much to admire” ( Booklist , starred review) in this “thoroughly engrossing” ( The New York Times Book Review ) memoir about a boy on the run with his mother, as she abducts him to Latin America in search of the revolution. Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight. They were chasing the revolution together, though the more they chased it the more distant it became. They battled the bad “isms” (sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, consumerism), and fought for the good “isms” (feminism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism). Between the ages of five and eleven, Peter lived in more than a dozen homes, moving from the comfortably bland suburbs of Detroit to a hippie commune in Berkeley to a socialist collective farm in pre-military coup Chile to highland villages and coastal shantytowns in Peru. When they secretly returned to America they settled down clandestinely in Denver, where his mother changed her name to hide from his father. A “luminous memoir” ( Publishers Marketplace , starred review) and “an illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love” ( Kirkus Reviews ) this is an extraordinary account of a deep mother-son bond and the joy and toll of growing up in a radical age. Peter Andreas is an insightful and candid narrator of “a profound and enlightening book that will open readers up to different ideas about love, acceptance, and the bond between mother and son” ( Library Journal , starred review). Peter Andreas is the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where he holds a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Andreas has published ten books, including Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution and Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America . He has also written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs , Foreign Policy , The Guardian , Harpers , The Nation , The New Republic , Slate , and The Washington Post . A graduate of Swarthmore College and Cornell University, he lives with his family in Providence, Rhode Island. Rebel Mother Carol and Carl MY MOTHER HAD always been the one to pick me up from nursery school, but one late June afternoon in 1969, a couple of weeks before my fourth birthday, my father arrived first and pushed me into the backseat of his gray Chevy Malibu. I could tell that something was not right by how tightly he gripped my hand and hurried me out of the school building to his car. Standing on my toes on the seat to look out the back window, I saw my mother’s beige VW station wagon arrive behind us just as we started to pull away from the curb. I waved at her. “Daddy, Daddy, Mommy’s coming!” “No, Mommy’s leaving,” my father grumbled, turning his head back briefly. “Now please, sit down.” My father slammed the accelerator and the car jerked forward, tipping me off balance. My mother, seeing that my father had already taken me, tailed us for as long as she could. She projected an air of calm, waving cheerfully at me from over the steering wheel, but she must have been anything but. Eventually, my father accelerated so fast that she became smaller and smaller, then disappeared into the distance. “Mommy’s gone,” I cried out, tears welling in my eyes. “Yes, that’s right, Peter, Mommy is gone. But don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” That afternoon was my first memory. It marked the beginning of my parents’ war over me. Earlier that day, while no one was home, my mother had quickly packed as much as she could into her car, mostly clothes and books but also a few of her favorite Pakistani pictures hanging in the living room, and moved out of the house for good. When my father got home from work and saw the empty closet, the first thing he’d done was rush to my preschool. Over the next six years, I would be kidnapped from school two more times—both times by my mother, who would carry me first across the country and then across continents. My father won that opening battle, but he would lose the war. During her devoutly conservative childhood, my mother would have seemed like the last person to kidnap her own child. She was born in 1933 in North Newton, a tightly knit Mennonite community of a few thousand inhabitants in central Kansas, where Mennonite wheat farmers from Ukraine had originally settled in the 1870s. When my mother was a child, most people didn’t venture out of North Newton much; if th