In many ways, Kathy Boudin was one of the best. Reading Family Circle, we're reminded that here was a young woman who used her advantages to fight for a world in which such advantages would cease to exist. Starting in high school, at Elisabeth Irwin in Greenwich Village (where Angela Davis, misidentified in the class photo, was a classmate), she picketed Woolworth's, protested air raid drills and crusaded against "conspicuous consumption." At Bryn Mawr in 1961, she agitated successfully on behalf of the college's black maids, and the following school year organized the "Second American Revolution," a conference on race relations in the United States. Working with Swarthmore's Cathy Wilkerson and Connie Brown, who later became SDS comrades, Boudin helped establish a temporary "freedom school" and was arrested on charges of "unlawful as-sembly and affray" for blocking the entrance to a nearby public school.

After spending her senior year at the University of Leningrad, where according to Braudy her father hoped to rid her of any lingering interest in Soviet-style Communism (not hard, if I remember correctly from an essay she wrote for a magazine I edited in 1969), Boudin graduated in absentia at the top of her class at Bryn Mawr. She moved on to SDS though she never joined, Braudy says, as Leonard never joined the Communist Party; but most SDSers never "joined," and Leonard Boudin had no interest in joining the CP. It is one of many comparisons between father and daughter that are fabricated out of thin stuff, or from conversations with one of Braudy's chief sources, Kathy's mother, Jean, who, before her death in 1994, gave Braudy the benefit of her reflections about her imprisoned daughter and the affairs of her husband (who died in 1989).

In the book, Braudy unfurls a plot about a dynasty of lawyers that makes no room for the rebel daughter. And a subplot: The middle figure in the patriarchal trio, the father, is unfaithful to his wife and to his daughter, by way of sleeping with at least one of her friends, and by undermining her. "What no one at Bryn Mawr suspected was that Kathy's stance was not as secure as it looked," writes Braudy. "Her equilibrium depended on Leonard's intoxicating approval, and this was not a sure thing." The Boudin legal dynasty features the great labor lawyer Louis B. Boudin ("B" for Boudinovitch), 1874-1952; and his nephew, Leonard, 1912-89, who represented Paul Robeson, Judith Coplon, Daniel Ellsberg, Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Cuban government; and Kathy's older brother Michael, a conservative whose stellar legal career made him a judge of the First (not the Second) Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Kathy, Braudy points out, originally wanted to be a doctor, not a lawyer, but no matter.

In a prepublication interview with David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, Braudy maintains that Kathy tried to outdo her famous father in notoriety, or goodness, or badness. "Ms. Boudin wanted to attack the sanctity of the law that her father held dear," writes Kirkpatrick. "But [Braudy] also argued that Ms. Boudin wanted to win as a client the attention she missed as a daughter. She may have also wanted 'to see him trumped by a case he could not win.'" Even though Boudin first called William Kunstler for the Brink's case, she soon settled on her father. "To horrified and fascinated friends," writes Braudy, "Kathy and her father seemed to have been preparing for the family tragedy for decades." But this makes little sense, and masks the fact that until shortly before the robbery, when Boudin had started meeting with her father to discuss the legal terms of her possible re-emergence, she'd had almost no contact with him.

When the trial finally comes, we're tired of the psychobabble about father and daughter ("Kathy was more terrified than ever that if stripped of her glamorous and dramatic revolutionary attachments, she would be the dullest person in Leonard's circle"), which fills in for the untold story. We're ready to sink our teeth into the courtroom drama, but instead we get jailhouse news--which is fascinating, and opens up twenty-two years of teaching, writing and AIDS counseling, twice as long as the underground period, and prepares us for Boudin's release. But first we need to know why she stayed underground when most of her Weather mates did not, and why she agreed to rent the getaway truck for the Family's boss, "Doc" Shakur.

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