Child of the Revolution

Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina F. Aptheker (Seal, 560 pp., $16.95)

BETTINA APTHEKER claims in her new memoir that Pablo Neruda once called her “good looking and intelligent.” This was a comradely gesture on his part. I remember her during Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement of 1964 as a slight and somewhat boyish figure radiating serious body anxiety as she tried to emulate the charismatic audacity of Mario Savio and the other leaders. In the years to come, she and her old friend Angela Davis would become the most celebrated Communists of the new generation. But at this point she was merely a curiosity: The daughter of Communist historian Herbert Aptheker and herself an admitted member of the party, she sometimes appeared surprised to be playing a major role in a New Left movement that believed (in theory, at least) that Communists were politically so obsolete that they should be stuffed and put on display in the Smithsonian.

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Peter Collier

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Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina F. Aptheker (Seal, 560 pp., $16.95)

BETTINA APTHEKER claims in her new memoir that Pablo Neruda once called her “good looking and intelligent.” This was a comradely gesture on his part. I remember her during Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement of 1964 as a slight and somewhat boyish figure radiating serious body anxiety as she tried to emulate the charismatic audacity of Mario Savio and the other leaders. In the years to come, she and her old friend Angela Davis would become the most celebrated Communists of the new generation. But at this point she was merely a curiosity: The daughter of Communist historian Herbert Aptheker and herself an admitted member of the party, she sometimes appeared surprised to be playing a major role in a New Left movement that believed (in theory, at least) that Communists were politically so obsolete that they should be stuffed and put on display in the Smithsonian.