BEING RED - Hardcover

Fast, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395551307 ISBN 13: 9780395551301

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1990

Synopsis

The best-selling author describes his membership in the Communist Party from 1944 to 1957; his hardships, blacklisting, and prison term during the McCarthy era; and his eventual disillusionment with the party

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Fast, still astonishingly prolific and frequently bestselling at 75, was catapulted to early fame by such books as Freedom Road and Citizen Tom Paine . He joined the Communist Party in 1944, at the height of U.S.-Soviet wartime amity, and in the ensuing Cold War paranoia found his life torn apart. Though hailed overseas as a successful writer who stood against McCarthyite hysteria, his name and books became anathema at home. Here he tells the remarkable story of how, when all the major U.S. publishers backed away from his Spartacus , he brought it out himself, with only a small, courageous order from the Doubleday chain--to see it eventually become a multimillion-copy seller and a celebrated movie. Fast does not regret his 13 years of party membership, and in that is refreshingly different from the many who later sourly recanted. Critical of party leadership, dogmatism and its unswerving idealization of the Soviet Union, he nevertheless argues convincingly that most American members were compassionate people who cared deeply for their country while deploring its racism and dog-eat-dog ethics; the idea that they could be, or wanted to be, a threat to national security is ludicrous to him. Fast describes this passage in his life like the master storyteller he is, and his insights into the failure of American communism make his book valuable as well as highly entertaining.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Passionately, artlessly, and with winning personal candor, Fast tells of his lower-class Bronx childhood, World War II work for Voice of America, disillusioning journalistic travels in the Third World, and activities in the Communist Party, to which he remained doggedly loyal until 1957. The book offers an invaluable account of a spirited fighter for the underdog whose prolific writing career was early caught between the paranoid cruelty of his own government and the ideological rigidity of the Communist leadership. While the basic outlines of his story are familiar, the vivid details are immensely revealing. Indispensable to the growing body of literature on America's terrifying postwar Red Scare. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/1/90.
- Charles C. Nash, Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0395551307
• ISBN 13: 9780395551301
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 370