The Big Dance: The Untold Story of Kathy Boudin and the Terrorist Family That Committed the Brink's Robbery Murders

The 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. (April)