Part of this review appeared on Dec. 3 in the book review section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bettina Aptheker adored her political, erudite father, who was a well-known Communist. "When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," Aptheker writes. "Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do." And one thing that Herbert Aptheker did extremely well, according to Bettina, was to deny any reality he didn't want to acknowledge.

Emulating her father, then, meant sharing his denial of the many questionable political realities, evading intellectual complexities she could not yet articulate, ignoring her own feminist observations of women's lives, restraining her sexual desire for women and, most of all, repressing childhood memories of her father's sexual abuse.

Determined to be his loyal, perfect daughter, Aptheker writes that she repressed this memory, so that she could function in her father's world. Her denial allowed her to become one of the few female leaders of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and to play a major role in the trial of her childhood friend and comrade Angela Davis, who was acquitted of murder charges. Her denial of her deepest desires and memories also allowed her to marry and raise two children.

But denial eventually catches up. Outside, Bettina Aptheker appeared confident and productive. Inside, she lived with constant anxiety and serious depression. "Incest survivors know despair," she writes. "It is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill despair. ... It's a different feeling. All through childhood, all through my twenties, I had this feeling. It was bottomless, endless, bone-deep, down to the marrow. I choked on it, fell prostrate with it. It was connected to a self-loathing so deep, so limitless, so without end that suicide seemed the only possible relief."

As she began to sift through her childhood materials and memories to write her memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became a Feminist Rebel, Aptheker suddenly remembered what she had repressed all those years. The memory was not recovered by therapy; it just suddenly appeared, and she collapsed to the ground:

"My father and I played other games too, beside baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing 'choo-choo train.' ... My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. ... And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they all had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we moved to a new house."

Soon after I read this shocking revelation, a colleague asked me whether it was really necessary for her to reveal this incest to the world. The answer, I believe, is that Bettina Aptheker's life and intellectual biography make no sense without understanding what she suffered and repressed. Although she describes this incest in one short account, it is a thread running through her efforts to become her own person.

Her revelation is not an act of vengeance. Nor does she write with rancor, but rather with boundless love and forgiveness that grew as she acknowledged her love for women, embraced feminism and moved in new intellectual directions. She never brought it up for discussion with her father. On the contrary, it was Herbert Aptheker, during the last year of his life, who asked if he had hurt her during her childhood. She told him the truth, and assured him that she had long forgiven him. He believed her, but couldn't remember the events. Gradually, that changed:

"After his heart attack, still in the hospital, he said, 'you've forgiven me.' It wasn't a question. It was a statement. I said, 'Yes, I have forgiven you.' He made the statement repeatedly in the months following, reassuring himself. That was how I came to realize that he had hid own knowledge of the incest. It was always present in his consciousness, just under the surface, as it had been in mine."

To be a successful and loyal daughter, Bettina Aptheker needed to repress these childhood memories. As she freed herself of her father's rigid Marxist worldview, she gained a new freedom to integrate a feminist analysis into her intellectual work, to embrace aspects of her Jewish heritage, as well as Buddhist practices, and to create a lasting partnership with a woman who "taught her the meaning of hope."

Though she describes episodes of debilitating despair, Aptheker's stunning memoir is not primarily about incest; it is ultimately a political, intellectual and emotional story of one woman's redemption. Once read, it is not easily forgotten.

Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

Mr. Lugovoi supported his claim by saying that he and Mr. Litvinenko visited a London-based security firm where traces of polonium were later found only in mid-October, but did not go there on Nov. 1, meaning that the contamination couldn't have taken place on that day.

Mr. Lugovoi's comments echo those made by another associate of Mr. Litvinenko, Russian businessman Dmitry Kovtun, who claimed in an interview with Germany's Spiegel TV that he must have been contaminated during meetings with Mr. Litvinenko and Mr. Lugovoi in London in mid-October.

Both Mr. Lugovoi and Mr. Kovtun have been questioned in Moscow by visiting Scotland Yard investigators and have denied involvement in Mr. Litvinenko's poisoning. The Russian Prosecutor General's office says Mr. Kovtun has been diagnosed with radiation poisoning. He is reportedly being treated in Russia.

Meanwhile, German investigators are also probing Mr. Kovtun on suspicion that he may have illegally handled radioactive material. German authorities have found traces of polonium-210 in locations visited by Mr. Kovtun before he travelled to London on Nov. 1.

They say Mr. Kovtun flew to Hamburg from Moscow on Oct. 28 and departed for London on Nov. 1. Traces of polonium-210 have been confirmed in the passenger seat of the BMW car that picked up Mr. Kovtun from the Hamburg airport.

That makes German officials believe that Mr. Kovtun already was contaminated with polonium-210 when he arrived in Hamburg - but how that happened is unclear.

Not everybody agrees with the former international president of one of the world's best-known humanitarian organisations. MSF itself has distanced itself from its conclusions, and Rostrup himself says the book is a personal stock-taking of 10 years in the field.

Back on his home turf, it stirred reactions in Scandinavia's close-knit aid world when Rostrup targeted Norway's five "top" aid organisations - the Norwegian Red Cross, Norwegian People's Aid, Norwegian Church Aid, Save the Children Norway and the Norwegian Refugee Council. Rostrup's book says these "big five" have close ties to the political world and many directors hopscotch between government and top posts in aid agencies, with current U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland a prime example.

He says the state funding these organisations take compromises their claims to independence, especially in instances when donors have not been neutral. Like the 1999 war in Serbia and Kosovo, when the Norwegian Red Cross accepted money from Norway's government, which as a NATO member was a party to the conflict.

The aid organisations in Rostrup's line of fire say that his attacks are simplistic and that longer-term aid and relief operations can't avoid juggling the political considerations he criticises. But Rostrup draws a hard line between development aid and humanitarian relief, and laments that the boundary is getting blurrier by the day as aid workers choose to mix solidarity work with emergency relief and political pragmatism with independent humanitarianism.

Rostrup backs up his thesis with a litany of examples from a decade in aid that spans most of Africa's almost-forgotten hotspots as well as high-profile emergencies including the tsunami and the wars in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq.

In the aftermath of Angola's civil war, he claims, people in rebel-held areas starved as the United Nations looked the other way to safeguard the country's peace process.

During southern Sudan's civil war in 1998, the United States used U.N. food relief to boost the rebels, leaving thousands to starve for political reasons. In Afghanistan, coalition forces dropped both food packages and cluster bombs and enlisted aid organisations in "humanitarian" operations.

Aid agencies are often too willing to sacrifice their independence for a slice of the state-sponsored action, Rostrup says - as Afghanistan itself has shown, where five MSF workers got killed and Rostrup himself was mistaken for a U.S. soldier.

The book's pet hate, however, is not the NGOs but the United Nations. With its double role as political player and humanitarian actor, Rostrup says, the U.N. system often leaves humanitarian aid strapped to the backseat as it speeds towards loftier goals of rebuilding, reconstruction and reintegration. He wishes U.N. humanitarian aid could be cut loose from politics and the rest of the U.N. machinery, but says the world body's "integrated" operations are doing just the opposite and increasingly tying humanitarian aid to long-term political goals.

The United Nations then attracts hapless aid agencies that depend on the body for funding, publicity and disaster assessments.

Sometimes "Felt" is anecdotal, detailing the bickering within MSF on whether to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, and sometimes it's repetitive, with constant calls for more independence in the aid jungle and back-slapping reminders of MSF's unique role in its fauna.

Rostrup also skirts broader discussions on the complex nature of contemporary wars, where the muddled line between aid worker and soldier is perhaps only a special case of warfare's vanishing border between civilian and combatant, victim and perpetrator, friend and enemy.

We're left with a simple and heartfelt contention rather than a thorough treatise: when aid goes political and the Geneva Conventions become background music to the world's wars, civilians' and aid workers' lives are endangered.

A timely sketch of a trying decade for many humanitarian operations, this book needs to trigger a larger debate outside its Scandinavian confines, but first Rostrup's humanitarian colleagues overseas will need to wait for a translation.

Documents seen by the Guardian reveal that Sir Richard was also paid a £15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and two other major companies, Dow Chemicals and ICI, for a review that largely cleared vinyl chloride, used in plastics, of any link with cancers apart from liver cancer - a conclusion with which the World Health Organisation disagrees. Sir Richard's review was used by the manufacturers' trade association to defend the chemical for more than a decade.

The revelations will dismay scientists and other admirers of Sir Richard's pioneering work and fuel a rift between the majority who support his view that the evidence shows cancer is a product of modern lifestyles and those environmentalists who argue that chemicals and pollution must be to blame for soaring cancer rates.

Yesterday Sir Richard Peto, the Oxford-based epidemiologist who worked closely with him, said the allegations came from those who wanted to damage Sir Richard's reputation for their own reasons. Sir Richard had always been open about his links with industry and gave all his fees to Green College, Oxford, the postgraduate institution he founded, he said.

Professor John Toy, medical director of Cancer Research UK, which funded much of Sir Richard's work, said times had changed and the accusations must be put into context. "Richard Doll's lifelong service to public health has saved millions of lives. His pioneering work demonstrated the link between smoking and lung cancer and paved the way towards current efforts to reduce tobacco's death toll," he said. "In the days he was publishing it was not automatic for potential conflicts of interest to be declared in scientific papers."

But a Swedish professor who believes that some of Sir Richard's work has led to the underestimation of the role of chemicals in causing cancers said that transparency was all-important. "It's OK for any scientist to be a consultant to anybody, but then this should be reported in the papers that you publish," said Lennart Hardell of University Hospital, Orebro.

Sir Richard died last year. Among his papers in the Wellcome Foundation library archive is a contract he signed with Monsanto. Dated April 29 1986, it extends for a year the consulting agreement that began on May 10 1979 and offers improved terms. "During the one-year period of this extension your consulting fee shall be $1,500 per day," it says.

Monsanto said yesterday it did not know how much work Sir Richard did for the company, but said he was an expert witness for Solutia, a chemical business spun off from Monsanto, as recently as 2000.

Amamanta, Spanish for breastfeeding, is a blend of two words that mean love and protection.

It is also the name of a doll family whose members may appeal to holiday shoppers looking beyond the latest Barbie or Bratz doll for a present that's non-hazardous to body image and can also educate about how babies are made, born and nurtured.

Each 16-inch cloth adult Amamanta doll has genitals and pubic hair, and the mother doll features breasts that can be snapped onto the baby doll's mouth to help reinforce the importance of breastfeeding.

"I wish children to be happy and grow with the idea that sexuality is important and is part of our lives," says Margarita Maria Mesa Leal, owner of the company that makes the dolls. Leal hand sews dolls herself, in addition to employing 27 local women in Medellin, Colombia, all of them mothers.

Dolls aren't cheap; an individual can be purchased for $39 or a family for up to $199. Leal didn't go into the particulars of what she pays her workers, but she says these prices allow her to pay a living wage and use only high quality materials.

Doll Explains Pregnancy

Leal, a former industrial designer, began the project in 2001 as an instructional device for her small daughter.

She created a mother doll, complete with a baby in the belly and a vagina, to explain that she was pregnant to her daughter. Though only 3 years old, her daughter took to the concept immediately, requesting a father doll and a sister doll to go with the mother and baby, just like her family. A for-profit, small business was born along with her son.

Leal sold the dolls to various families and small businesses around Colombia, and eventually throughout South America. She also spent much of those early months making dolls for a local orphanage filled with children, many of whom had lost their parents in Medellin, a cauldron of drug cartel-related violence during the 1990s. The dolls were a great tool for educating the children, many of whom did not have basic knowledge of human anatomy or sexuality and some of whom had also been sexually assaulted while on the streets.

Leal soon realized that many of these supposed orphans, in fact, had mothers who were too poor to take care of them. She began employing this population, providing them with just the opportunity they needed to move out of poverty and reclaim their children.

When Raul Morales, a Bronx, N.Y.-based advertising entrepreneur, stumbled upon Leal's table at a doll trade show in 2002, he was immediately taken by the quality and ingenuity of the dolls, but even more by Leal's commitment to the women and children of Colombia. A South American immigrant himself, Leal's work reminded him of home.

Sought by Educators and Families

OneWorld, a small business Morales owns, became the U.S. mail order distributor for the dolls. Their clients include parents, expectant women, doulas, child psychologists, sex educators, hospitals and child advocacy organizations throughout the Americas. He projects that OneWorld, constituted by Morales and two part-time consultants, will make about $25,000 total North American sales in 2006; Leal sells about the same amount to South American clients directly.

From its three original members the Amamanta Family has grown into a sprawling clan of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, adolescents and even step-parents representing more than 10 cultures. In addition to Colombian members, the company also makes contemporary U.S., traditional Indian and Japanese dolls.

Leal continues creating new dolls and making changes, sometimes at the suggestion of her customers.

Teresa Benami of Atlanta contacted Morales last December, after her 3-year-old daughter, Cora, made a request while playing with her new family of dolls, which had been a Hanukkah present. "She was worried about the newborn baby being cold and asked for a diaper," Benami said.

"I conveyed to Teresa that her little girl had just has given me a great idea for product innovation," Morales says.

Leal loved the idea and immediately designed a diaper to be included with all of the Amamanta Family doll units, which currently also come with a sling to carry the baby, clothes, a blanket and a brochure designed to guide the educational experience.

Dolls Also May Offend

The dolls, however, are not for everyone.

In fact, as Women's eNews was interviewing Morales, at a coffee shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he pulled out an Amamanta Family of dolls to show the way in which a baby can be "born" from the mother's stomach and then snapped onto a breast to simulate breastfeeding. His demonstration offended a man at a nearby table who angrily asked, "Do you mind?"

Morales was not surprised. "People think these dolls are radical, but isn't it more radical to castrate a part of the human body as if kids will not notice?" he said, referring to conventional dolls, which now often feature breasts, but typically leave out genitalia.

But other people see the dolls as a way to communicate honestly and positively with children about human anatomy. He says recent customers include a health educator who planned to take the dolls to a rural part of Africa, where she was teaching children about AIDS with the challenge of not speaking the local language.

Parents for Megan's Law -- a Stony Brook, N.Y., nonprofit that seeks to prevent child sexual abuse -- recently put in the largest order Amamanta has ever received, hoping to use the dolls to educate children about the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touch.

Courtney E. Martin is a writer, teacher and filmmaker living in Brooklyn. "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body," her first book, which will be published on Simon and Schuster's Free Press in spring of 2007. You can read more about Courtney's work at www.courtneyemartin.com.