Synopses & Reviews
In l990, a car bomb in Oakland almost killed radical Earth First! leader Judi Bari and her passenger, a co-leader and onetime lover, Darryl Cherney. The FBI accused the pair of transporting the explosive device knowingly as part of a violent campaign of "ecotage." From her hospital bed, Bari charged that the timber interests of Northern California and the FBI had tried to kill her. The car bomb and the competing conspiracy theories about who was responsible made Bari a national figure; but she had long been a legendary figure among California activists. A veteran of the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s who moved to militant feminism and environmentalism after the war ended, Bari was involved in the radical eco-organization Earth First! by the mid-1980s and leading the fight against the logging companies on the Northern California coast. Not long before the attempt on her life, she had summoned young people from all over the country to join her in a crusade to save the remaining redwood forests of the Pacific Coast in a "Redwood Summer" based on the Mississippi Summer of the civil rights movement a quarter-century earlier. The Secret Wars of Judi Bari traces Bari's rise from college activist to a would-be Mother Jones of the Redwoods. Drawing on extensive interviews with Bari's friends, comrades and critics, Kate Coleman describes Bari's long struggle for selfhood against her communist parents and her husband (himself a former member of violent political groups); against those in her movement who felt that she was not radical enough; and ultimately against the FBI and the State of California. Judi Bari's wars continued until her death from cancer five years after the explosion that changed her life forever. In creating a dramatic portrait of a unique American life, Coleman takes the reader inside the radical politics that outlived the 1960s, and into the Earth First! movement and the back-to-nature counterculture of the North Coast of California. This is a world that Coleman has lived in herself and spent her career documenting as a writer. In The Secret Wars of Judi Bari she has produced a book that is at once a crime story, a social history, and a compelling biography of a woman at war with her world.
Review
"Judy Bari, it must be recalled, was the Earth First! forestry activist who in 1990 was driving an automobile with a male friend in Oakland, California, near its boundary with neighboring Berkeley, when a bomb exploded from within the car, grievously injuring her and her companion. The FBI and the Oakland policies suspected that the bomb was being transported by Bari as part of an eco-terrorist venture which had gone wrong. But others thought the FBI was responsible in some kind of COINTELPRO operation akin to what the agency been implicated in with the Black Panthers. Some environmentalists thought the bomb had been planted by her California timber company enemies. Still others, believed that a former husband had planted it because of child custody disputes.
This book is primarily a biography of Judy Bari, a prominent, charismatic, leader in the eco-feminist, environmental monkey-wrenching movement even before the bomb exploded. But the bombing and the wildly different claims about who was responsible took over her often painful, final years. Her efforts to vindicate her sometimes changing position on who was responsible for the bomb, even as she struggled with physical pain and difficult personal and family issues is depressing reading. Readers will be interested to learn that an out-of-court settlement of her lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police occurred in 2002. In legal terms this is interesting, in human terms it is anti-climactic. Bari had died of breast cancer in 1997. The COINTELPRO claims were discredited. It took 12 years of legal machinations, 6 weeks of trial, and 17 days of jury deliberation before the $4.4 million dollar settlement was finally reached. But the reader is more interested in solving the puzzle of who was responsible for placing the bomb in the car: and that puzzle remains uncertain, even in the author's mind." Reviewed by Richard C. Collins, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
The Secret Wars of Judi Bari traces Bari's rise from college activist to a would-be Mother Jones of the Redwoods. Drawing on extensive interviews with her friends, comrades and critics, Kate Coleman describes Bari's struggle for self-hood against her husband (himself a former member of violent political groups); against those in her movement who felt that she was not radical enough; and ultimately against the FBI and the State of California. Judi Bari's wars continued until her death from cancer five years after the explosion that changed her life forever.
Synopsis
In l990, a car bomb in Oakland almost killed radical Earth First! leader Judi Bari and her passenger, a co-leader and onetime lover, Darryl Cherney. The FBI accused the pair of transporting the explosive device knowingly as part of a violent campaign of "ecotage." From her hospital bed, Bari charged that the timber interests of Northern California and the FBI had tried to kill her. The car bomb and the competing conspiracy theories about who was responsible made Bari a national figure; but she had long been a legendary figure among California activists. A veteran of the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s who moved to militant feminism and environmentalism after the war ended, Bari was involved in the radical eco-organization Earth First! by the mid-1980s and leading the fight against the logging companies on the Northern California coast. Not long before the attempt on her life, she had summoned young people from all over the country to join her in a crusade to save the remaining redwood forests of the Pacific Coast in a "Redwood Summer" based on the Mississippi Summer of the civil rights movement a quarter-century earlier. The Secret Wars of Judi Bari traces Bari's rise from college activist to a would-be Mother Jones of the Redwoods. Drawing on extensive interviews with Bari's friends, comrades and critics, Kate Coleman describes Bari's long struggle for selfhood against her communist parents and her husband (himself a former member of violent political groups); against those in her movement who felt that she was not radical enough; and ultimately against the FBI and the State of California. Judi Bari's wars continued until her death from cancer five years after the explosion that changed her life forever. In creating a dramatic portrait of a unique American life, Coleman takes the reader inside the radical politics that outlived the 1960s, and into the Earth First! movement and the back-to-nature counterculture of the North Coast of California. This is a world that Coleman has lived in herself and spent her career documenting as a writer. In The Secret Wars of Judi Bari she has produced a book that is at once a crime story, a social history, and a compelling biography of a woman at war with her world.