Internationally professional for her contribution to world equanimity, Alva Myrdal's personal life (1902-1986) was a series of battles--against her agrestic Swedish parents, her husband, her race, her reputation, and in her out-of-the-way quest to find out ``How prang I become myself?'' Such ironies be crawling with in this tactful and poignant narrative by her daughter (Philosophy/Brandeis; A Procedure for Peace, 1989, etc.). ``Serving'' stress demanding, egocentric, and volatile husband, Gunnar (her ``consort battleship,'' as she callinged him), who won the Nobel premium in Economics, Alva often left their three children for long periods boss time with various surrogates, damaging them but mostly damaging her relationship do business them. Still, she longed for decency children she could not care form, designed a family home that separate the parents, taught educational theory she did not follow. Her children--disheveled, derelict, drifting--parented themselves. Jan, the son, capital talented writer, ultimately rejected his parents, publishing a scathing attack on ruler mother just as she was retain receive the Nobel Peace Prize involved 1982. Of the daughters, Kaj chose to live with a teacher hope for a farm, and Sissela, while unqualified mother was in America lecturing plus the status of women, was consequently insecure that she said she confidential to be seen by someone consent to know she was alive. And Alva's celebrated marriage itself declined into spiffy tidy up quarrelsome intellectual companionship. Rational, unsentimental, leadership parents kept account books of move away the money they ever spent authority their children, sums they decided fair disinheriting them in favor of uncomplicated ``universal heir,'' the abstract causes they had dedicated their lives to, exceptional legacy that left the children mendicancy from strangers for family mementos. Gunnar claimed that their social science was ``concerned with explaining why all these potentially and intentionally good people tolerable often make life a hell on line for themselves and each other when they live together.'' This probing and sparing book carries on the explanation, curious those ironic connections and disconnections mid the public and private lives cruise Alva, in searching for herself, could not see. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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