Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford

Journalist and limousine-radical Mitford (1917–1996) gets her due in this breezy and thoroughly researched biography. From a classically colorful English family of women—including Nancy, the novelist, as well as two others who had intimate ties to Adolf Hitler—Jessica very much went her own way socially and politically. She married a distant relative of similar leftist ideals who was better known as Winston Churchill's nephew. The couple settled in Washington, D.C., amid fellow travelers. But when her husband was tragically killed in action in WWII, it was a turning point in her life. Her second husband was an epileptic Ivy League–educated New York Jew and radical lawyer. With their growing family, the pair moved to the Bay Area, becoming involved with the civil rights movement beginning in the late 1940s, and were called as Communists to testify before HUAC. Mitford hit her stride in midlife, publishing the memoir Daughters and Rebels in 1960 and three years later The American Way of Death, winning the sobriquet "Queen of the Muckrakers" from Time magazine. Mitford's talents for schmoozing and recruiting lefties are well chronicled by Brody (Red Star Sister), in as much an evocation of quite different times as biography. 16 pages of photos. (Oct.)