改革風起雲湧的六○年代，一名美國中西部主婦綁架自己的兒子浪跡南美，只為追尋她理想中的革命，開啟了小男孩顛沛的不凡童年……然而他們越追逐，革命似乎越遙不可及。

美國布朗大學國際關係教授彼得．安卓亞斯（Peter Andreas）在母親猝逝後，從她的住處發現時間橫跨三十年的上百本日記。這些他的二位哥哥不感興趣的遺物，使他有機會重新正視、理解自己異於常人的童年經驗，以及離經叛道的母親卡蘿。

卡蘿生長在堪薩斯中部的基督教門諾派小鎮，雖然早婚，仍在大學接觸了心理學、社會學思潮。但在五零年代的中西部，即使擁有碩士學位（後來更再取得博士學位），成為家庭主婦仍是她的唯一選項。然而，六零年代席捲世界的改革解放思潮衝擊、召喚著卡蘿，小兒子彼得卻也正好在她希望擺脫傳統主婦角色時降生。卡蘿成為基進女性主義、馬克思主義者，獻身公民、婦權、反戰運動，經常帶著年幼的彼得：作者第一次參加反戰遊行時還在吃流質食物，三歲就騎著飾有和平標誌與花朵的三輪車上街。

卡蘿與丈夫的觀念越來越背道而馳，決定聲請當時仍屬罕見的離婚訴訟，更大膽在監護權纏訟中偷偷帶走還在唸幼稚園的彼得，開始母子多年的流離。從六零年代末到八零年代初，卡蘿身邊換了多任丈夫及無數情人，與彼得輾轉在三個州、五個國家間飄盪過日，在南美洲追逐理想中的革命精神與面貌。

然而他們越追逐，革命似乎越遙不可及。母子經常奔波、搬遷、躲藏，彼得在五歲到十一歲之間，從單調舒適的底特律郊區，搬到加州柏克萊的嬉皮公社，阿言德時期智利的社會主義集體農場，到秘魯的高地村落，落腳沿岸的貧民窟，有時候彼得幾乎是自食其力在街頭生存。當他們終於回到美國，在丹佛秘密定居，卡蘿改名換姓，躲避彼得生父的追查。

《反叛的母親》（Rebel Mother）令人驚嘆地刻劃母子之間深刻的牽絆，栩栩如生重現七零年代反文化、左翼運動場景，獨具魅力的母親卡蘿，反映那個時代對於自由與理想的追求，以及理想主義者留下的未竟之夢與殘破關係的沉重代價，誠懇而深富洞見。

Peter Andreas is the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where he holds a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Andreas has published ten books, including Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. He has also written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, Slate, and The Washington Post. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Cornell University, he lives with his family in Providence, Rhode Island.

“A mother and her young son go looking for a liberation that verges on chaos in this luminous memoir. Political scientist Andreas (Smuggler Nation) recounts his adventures with his mother, Carol, a Mennonite turned Marxist anti-war feminist who abducted the five-year-old Peter from Michigan in 1969 during a custody dispute with her ex-husband, taking him on a years-long odyssey through South America in search of revolutionary ferment. His narrative is a vivid, picaresque tour of early-1970s left-wing counterculture: squalid communes; collective farms in Salvador Allende’s Chile; Peruvian slums, where Carol became interested in the Sendero Luminoso guerilla movement; vehement arguments about anti-establishment rectitude and fine points of Marxist theory; endless scrounging while disdaining all material desires. Mother and son both ran pretty wild (Andreas virtually raised himself in the streets while Carol sometimes bedded her parade of lovers in the room she shared with Andreas, until she married an erratic Peruvian street performer half her age), and Andreas feels both exhilaration and a longing for the stable, orderly life his father represents. Andreas’s exuberant but clear-eyed memoir paints an indelible portrait of his charismatic mother, the era’s expansive pursuit of freedom and idealistic commitment, and the toll of exhausted dreams and frayed relationships the idealists left behind.”——出版人週刊，星級評論