Pam C. (PamC) reviewed on 10/31/2016 + 117 more book reviews

From the dust cover: American leftists, whether old, new, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, or freaks, are Americans first and foremost. And despite its internationalist claims and lip-service to an occasional theoretical approach, the U.S. Left, in all its incarnations, owes as much homage to the B-Movie as to Karl Marx. This is not to disparage it, but to pin-point the root of its desires and motives.

David Zane Mairowitz's account of the American-left-as-soap-opera is rich in tragi-comedy, in real personalities as well as phoney culture heroes: among them, Stanislavsky, Sacco and Vanzetti, John Garfield, the Hollywood Ten, Bertolt Brecht, the Rosenbergs, Martin Dies, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Wilhelm Reich, Richard M. Nixon, Joan Baez, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary, Dr. Spock and Baba Ram DAss.

This stunningly written and compellingly readable book puts the radicalism of the past fifty years into a new perspective.

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