It is no easy task bringing new life to an era already as dissected as the McCarthy era, yet this is what Schrecker (History/Yeshiva Univ.; No Ivory Tower, 1986, etc.) accomplishes in a magnificent study of how and why McCarthyism happened and how its shadow still darkens our lives. McCarthyism, for the author, was no historical anomaly, nor was it the latest version of American populist anti-intellectualism, as the liberal explanation at the time would have it. It was, rather, a right-wing conspiracy, and a particularly effective one: —the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.— This disparate group of persons and organizations included, among others, ambitious politicians (think Nixon), the American Legion, former Communists, anti-union business leaders, Catholic trade-union activists, and (connecting and coordinating it all) Hoover and the FBI. Together, they were able to create and propagate an image of American Communists as not merely dissenters but as a dangerous monolithic presence whose very existence threatened the safety and security of the US. Convinced of American Communism’s absolute evil—a stereotype based in part on the party’s very real proclivities for secrecy, prevarication, and fealty to Moscow—any repression could be seen as necessary. Most provocative is Schrecker’s analysis of the legacy of McCarthyism. Quite simply, she notes, “McCarthyism destroyed the left.” Organized labor was tamed, dissenting voices on foreign policy were silenced, scholarship was rendered obedient to the prevailing political winds, popular culture became vapid and monochromatic. But the deepest loss was of an American tradition in which activism and outrage were a vigorous part of the political culture. When a new left did emerge in the 1960s, it had no immediate predecessors to learn from, for a whole generation of activists had been lost. This is a marvelous and chilling work; it reminds us how easily democratic processes can be jettisoned in the name of national security. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-77470-7
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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