I’d never been to New York City, or heard of Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and had only a vague notion of who or what a Black Panther revolutionary might be-and none of that turned out to matter. Instead, it described a cocktail party given in the late 1960s for the Black Panthers by Leonard Bernstein in his fancy New York City apartment.
It seemed just the sort of thing to answer some questions I had about the facts of life. The only word in the title I understood was “the.” The cover showed a picture of a bored-looking blonde housewife nestled in the lap of a virile black man. The book I still remember taking down from the shelf was Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.
They’d been invisible right up to the moment someone or something told me that the books on them were stuffed with dirty words and shocking behavior-a rumor whose truth was eventually confirmed by Portnoy’s Complaint. I was 11 or maybe 12 years old when I discovered my parents’ bookshelves.
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