Luisa passerini autobiography of benjamin

Luisa Passerini. Wesleyan University Press, $25 (182pp) ISBN 978-0-8195-5286-0

With a surprisingly fluid mix of autobiography and interviews, Passerini studies both Italy's 1968 student uprisings and her own psyche.

Chapters alternate between sections from Passerini's journals (organized roughly by month) and bits from interviews with former student radicals. While the final pastiche has some holes, it is an interesting juxtaposition of the personal and the political, further helped by a clear, uncluttered translation.

Passerini's journal concentrates greatly on a failed love affair and her continuing psychoanalysis, but her occasional obliqueness (e.g., the reader is never completely informed about the affair) prevents the appearance of self-indulgence.

Passerini is as forthright and insightful about herself as she is about others: at one point, she even details her adherence to a Steiner purification diet that involved a ""negation of heritage""--