Rebel Mother

Starred review from December 12, 2016
A mother and her young son go looking for a liberation that verges on chaos in this luminous memoir. Political scientist Andreas (Smuggler Nation) recounts his adventures with his mother, Carol, a Mennonite turned Marxist anti-war feminist who abducted the five-year-old Peter from Michigan in 1969 during a custody dispute with her ex-husband, taking him on a years-long odyssey through South America in search of revolutionary ferment. His narrative is a vivid, picaresque tour of early-1970s left-wing counterculture: squalid communes; collective farms in Salvador Allende’s Chile; Peruvian slums, where Carol became interested in the Sendero Luminoso guerilla movement; vehement arguments about anti-establishment rectitude and fine points of Marxist theory; endless scrounging while disdaining all material desires. Mother and son both ran pretty wild (Andreas virtually raised himself in the streets while Carol sometimes bedded her parade of lovers in the room she shared with Andreas, until she married an erratic Peruvian street performer half her age), and Andreas feels both exhilaration and a longing for the stable, orderly life his father represents. Andreas’s exuberant but clear-eyed memoir paints an indelible portrait of his charismatic mother, the era’s expansive pursuit of freedom and idealistic commitment, and the toll of exhausted dreams and frayed relationships the idealists left behind. Photos.

February 1, 2017
Reflections on a childhood spent with a feminist, revolution-minded mother.When Andreas' (International Studies/Brown Univ.; Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, 2013, etc.) mother died, he found hundreds of her journals, written over more than three decades, including when he traveled with her as a young boy throughout South America. Born in Kansas and raised as a Mennonite, Carol Andreas was not a typical 1950s housewife content to play mother to her three sons. She quickly discovered the political activism and feminism movements of the mid-1960s and wanted to be a part of the revolution, wherever it might take place. After leaving his father and living in a commune for a couple of years, mother and son moved to South America, traveling the countryside and living in squalor to be one with the local people. Throughout the book, Andreas impressively re-creates the settings and conversations that took place in Chile and Peru in the early 1970s. The author fully immerses readers in his experiences, which included a lack of discipline or structure to daily life, poverty, and filth (he notes numerous bouts with lice and invasions of mice), and he captures the love felt between mother and son as they worked alongside the poor. Andreas doesn't hide his mother's obsessive nature, shy away from mentioning details of listening to her numerous lovers while he pretended to sleep mere feet from the bed, or dismiss the angst he felt when he thought about his American father, whom he missed very deeply at times. The author also includes details of his infrequent interactions with his older brothers, who were on their own different paths. The overall picture is one of adventure, self-reliance, and intimacy during times of great change, and Andreas offers an informative perspective on what it was like to be a kid through it all. An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era South America.

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November 15, 2016
In the Sixties, conventional housewife Carol Andreas morphed into a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary, involving her youngest son in her causes. The author, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, recounts the pleasures and drawbacks of a peripatetic, radicalized childhood and his close bond with his mother.

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