Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia

There are fascinating moments in this memoir of a young woman living during the 1960s counterculture, but Brody takes herself so seriously that she often sabotages her own undertaking with ponderous commentary. She compares a tough first-grade teacher to Nixon, because ""[n]either could tolerate opposition, and both were determined to crush dissent."" At her suburban high school in the late 1960s, Brody and a friend who also had long hair were hair-sprayed by primmer students. ""Their intent,"" she writes, ""was to immobilize our hair and, by extension, our minds."" Once she'd graduated from high school, Brody hit the road, ending up at a communal house in Chicago with the White Panther Party, where she was the token feminist yet still expected to do the dishes. After a short stint in Ann Arbor, Mich., she boarded an old school bus with a group bound for Pittsburgh, Pa. Claiming to have few memories of that trip, she offers verbatim journal entries instead. If Brody's retrospective voice can be heavy-handed, her youthful diary has no sense of irony whatsoever, although this earnest chapter does have a few humorous moments (""NOTE TO MYSELF. Never take hallucinogens in a police station again!""). Brody continued to write for alternative papers, putting out a column under the name Buckwheat Groats, and eventually she headed to Europe, where she hoped to show up at the Paris peace talks and end the Vietnam War. Brody certainly had her share of fascinating experiences, and for the most part this is a smooth read, but even now, with years of hindsight, she seems at a loss to say what those experiences meant. (Aug.)