Navigate Books of the Month: Drawing
from Life Red
Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America A
Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency Half
and Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural Split:
a Countercultural Childhood Previous Books of
the Month: |
FLOWER CHILD Split:
A Counterculture Childhood
Lisa Michaels' image is forever captured in the pages of Life magazine as a toddler hoisting a Viet Cong flag. Soon after the picture appeared, her father was imprisoned for his participation in an antiwar protest. During his years in jail, Michaels travels west with her mother and stepfather in a renovated mail truck, eventually settling in a small Northern California town. Split is anchored in the '60s and traverses the Reagan era as Michaels recounts her version of coming of age: communes, outhouses, mockery for being a hippie and sharing time among her mother, father and two step parents. All is told with impeccable memory free of bitterness; Michaels' training as a poet is evident in her graceful, matter-of-fact prose. Her confrontations with her father (who often seems more involved in activism than in raising his daughter) and her frustration with her mother (whose hippie ideals were outdated and impractical when applied to a teen) keep Split from being just another glorification of growing up on '60s values. --Jackie Kasten |
originally published July 29, 1998