How to Spoil Someone’s Self-Esteem

Chesa Boudin, “radical royalty,” was raised by Bill Ayers after his own parents had been incarcerated for violent activities with the Weather Underground. He has gone on to attend Yale, to win a Rhodes scholarship, and to travel throughout South America on a journey of self-styled, self-documented self-discovery—chronicled in his newly published Gringo .

It sounds like the beginning of a “radical chic” narrative, to borrow a phrase from the NY Times review . But it seems that the coming-of-age, “smug but searching,” college-admissions-essay genre has grown dull, even to the radical chic folks of the Times . Dwight Garner’s review concludes with cruel counsel: “Chesa Boudin seems like a genial guy with a bright future stretching far ahead of him. If Gringo is any indication, that future should not include committing sentences to paper with the intention of distributing them widely.”