The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 July 1999
by Lisa Michaels
Lisa Michaels, at the age of just three, appeared in Life magazine, waving a Viet Cong flag across Boston Common. This book is a memoir of growing up with parents who took the countercultural ideals of the late 1960s very, very seriously. This reader found himself recognizing parallels between his life and that of the author, a fact that made her story all the more engrossing. Michaels tells about her parents' split-up when she was still almost an infant, and the Odyssean travels across the country and between her parents as she was growing up. Her father continued to be a labor organizer, while her mother turned from teaching in Harlem to teaching in a small Northern California town where they grew their own vegetables. But as Michaels grew older, her family, it seemed, became less and less the countercultural icons they had started out as, and became more a family merely struggling to get by while their oldest daughter discovered herself in her teen and college years. The second half of the book is less a story of being a child carrying a VC flag than a story of self discovery and anxiety. Though the book ends up not living up to its post-60s nostalgic packaging, it is still well-written and often touching; the vignettes ring deeply true every step of the way.
See also: [Pagan Time] & [Wild Child]
[Other Books by Women Authors]