Big Dance: The Untold Story Of Weather-Man Kathy Boudin And The Terrorist Family That Committed The Brinks Robbery Murders

Big Dance: The Untold Story of Weather-Man Kathy Boudin and the Terrorist Family That Committed the Brinks Robbery Murders

Drawing on interviews, testimony, FBI reports, and surveillance tapes, this report documents the Brink's robbery in 1981, in which three people were killedFrom Publishers WeeklyThe 1981 Brink's casea $1.6 million robbery involving three murders outside a Rockland County, N.Y., mallled to the arrest of several radical figures, including Kathy Boudin, an underground fugitive last seen over 10 years earlier fleeing an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Castellucci, who covered the case for the Rockland Journal-News, succeeds in piecesing together a brisk, straightforward narrative of complex events that ultimately joined Boudin and a violent group together in "political" crime. Going beyond the robbery and trial (Boudin was found guilty), the author traces Boudin's life as a privileged young woman torn between her bourgeois past and radical principles, and her family's roots in political activism. Although a solid factual account of the "Big Dance" (the robbery's code name), Castellucci's book will nonetheless leave many wishing for a deeper exploration of this group and its "hopelessly mixed" motives.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalCastellucci chronicles the events surrounding the 1981 $1.6-million Brink's robbery that cost the lives of one guard and two Nyack, N.Y., policemen and exposed a fanatical underground political cell that included Kathy Boudin, the notorious Sixties radical. The author, a journalist who covered the case, exposes the backgrounds of the participants and supporters: an odd assortment, many like Boudin who began as idealists and protesters, but took their beliefs to a fanaticism that preached robbery and murder. The author was unrelenting in his research of legal records, court testimony, and FBI interviews, but unfortunately was unable to interview Boudin or any members of "The Family." However, The Big Dance provides unique documentation of a thin slice of life hidden from the public. Melinda Stivers Leach, Precision Editorial Svces . , Boulder, Col.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.