Intimate Politics

About this book

"At eight years old, Bettina F. Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in the McCarthy Hearings in 1953. Born into one of the most influential Communist families in America, whose friends included W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina Aptheker witnessed firsthand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with terrible secrets: childhood sexual abuse and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions." "A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is, at its core, the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world, to break the silence of family secrets, and to speak her truth, no matter what the cost."--Jacket.