The fascinating but exhausting political memoirs of Radosh (Divided They Fell, 1996, etc.), a classic Red-diaper-baby who lost faith in his parents’ ideals and became a neoconservative.
As a boy growing up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Radosh was taught to look forward to the Revolution much as his ancestors had been told to await the Messiah. Both of his parents were ardent Communists who had made pilgrimages to Russia and worked for a variety of party causes in New York. Radosh himself spent his summers at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (“Workers’ Children’s Camp”—where he learned revolutionary songs from Pete Seeger) and was expelled from the Safety Patrol at PS 173 for refusing to accept an academic award from the Daughters of the American Revolution. After high school he went to study at the University of Wisconsin (mainly because it was the only campus in America that had an above-ground communist student group in the 1950s), but he eventually returned to New York to teach history in the CUNY system. Taking advantage of newly opened government archives, Radosh began to research a study of the Rosenberg case, hoping to exonerate the couple (whose children he had known at summer camp) of the treason charges for which they were executed in 1953. Instead, he came to the conclusion that they had, in fact, passed atomic secrets to the Russians after all. In 1983, he published his findings in The Rosenberg File—and promptly became a pariah on the Left. His later doubts about the benevolence of the Sandinistas (and the political intelligence of their limo-liberal supporters in the US) helped clear Radosh’s mind, and he broke definitively with his old comrades. This caused him some distress, not all of which was personal, and he had a hard time finding academic posts afterwards. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he works for a policy research center at George Washington University.
Radosh is more interesting as an intellect than as a writer, and his account tends to drag on endlessly—especially when he is settling old scores.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-893554-05-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
