Commies
Subtitle: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left
Publisher: Encounter Books; Encounter
Published: April 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9781893554054
Subjects: Biography: general; Marxism & Communism; Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies; United States - General; Political Ideologies - Communism & Socialism; Communism; History; Politics / Current Events; United States - 20th Century; History: American; USA; History & Theory - Radical Thought; Communists; New left; Right and left (Political scie; United States
First sentence: RON KOVIC, THE RADICAL VIETNAM VET, CLAIMS SARCASTICALLY to have been born on the Fourth of July; I have always thought of myself-with growing irony-as having been born on the First of May.
Description: "Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to a May Day demonstration on Fifth Avenue by his Communist parents. His boyhood heroes were his uncle Irving Keith (his Communist Party name), who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother's cousin Jacob Abrams, a famous Jewish anarchist who lived in "exile" in Mexico City and was a friend of Trotsky's.".

"Radosh has been called "the Zelig of the American Left - seen everywhere and knowing everyone." Indeed, Commies is filled with memorable portraits of the people he has met in his unique journey - schoolmate Mary Travers, later of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger, who taught him the banjo and the Communist Party's musical line; young Bob Dylan, who played folk music with him at Radosh's apartment in Madison.

Michael Harrington, Tom Hayden, Michael Lerner, William Appleman Williams, Irving Howe, and all the others who made "the Movement" are also actors in Radosh's drama." "But if Commies is an intimate social history of the American Left over the past half-century, it is also a compelling story of a crisis of radical faith."--BOOK JACKET.