Volume 53, Number 4 · March 9, 2006
An Ordinary Girl
By Evan Hughes
Trance
by Christopher Sorrentino
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 516 pp., $26.00
It began badly. When a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army claimed credit for the November 1973 murder of the Oakland schools superintendent, Marcus Foster, in a wild 'communiqué'—'notice is hereby served on the enemy political police state and all its lackeys'—Sixties radicals could only be as perplexed as anyone else paying attention. Why kill a well-respected black leader dedicated to education reform? Here was Kent State turned on its head, for the sympathy was with the members of 'the system'—Foster and his middle-class family, and his frightened deputy, Robert Blackburn, injured in the attack. The hour was late in America for the SLA to be condemning Foster's new student ID card program as an 'Internal Warfare Identification Computer System,' or for their closing slogan, 'DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE.'
Review, 3575 words
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