UP MY MOTHER'S FLAGPOLE

Or, how a nice all-American girl from Toledo, Ohio, spent her girlhood fighting the Communist menance and engaging in a lovely correspondence with Mrs. Hannah Nixon about the wonderful political career of her son, Richard, only to fall into perdition at MIT where slowly but surely she was swept up in the International Communist-Zionist-Homosexual Conspiracy as she gallantly struggled through life supported by Joe McCarthy on her Right and Erik Erikson on her Left. It took Danah (Donna Logan before she converted to Judaism) twenty years to unlearn the wisdom picked up at her mother the Latin teacher's knee where she also learned that the Roman, Cataline, ""was the first socialist,"" and Time and The Reader's Digest nothing but commie rags. After the Russians put up Sputnik to bury America she lost no time in taking up nuclear physics in the family garage which led to MIT and a doomed love for a certain Professor Soskin who convinced her that homosexuality ""was the sine qua non of Americanism"" just as Elementary Quantum Mechanics was undermining her last firm faith and the ""shady character of the atom"" became only too evident. Somewhere along the road to total confusion Danah was seduced to a queasy liberalism by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and though she did go ahead and spy on the ADA for the John Birch Society her true faith was becoming pathetically undone. . . in this wacky, often hilarious account of the Education of a Patriot wherein Danah, like Alice, finds the world around her becoming curiouser and curiouser. . . .