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Summary: The most instructive memoir of the last half-century.
Review: David Horowitz exposes the ongoing romance with 1960s radicalism as myth and lays bare the ugly truth about the "revolution" and many of the players in it. What makes this book especially compelling is Horowitz's indoctrination into Marxism early in life and his work with notable radicals such as writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell and later Tom Hayden and Oakland Black Panther Huey Newton. This book screams out to be read by those misinformed souls who swallow whole the rantings of left-wing academics and dishonest journalists. After reading this book, modern America makes perfect sense. Horowitz puts all the pieces together. This is perhaps the most important autobiography of our time.
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Summary: Outstanding & absorbing history
Review: This book is difficult to put down and a must read for anyone coming of age in the '60s. It should be required reading for college students, especially poltical science majors. Horowitz's ongoing commentary on the left and its influence, makes up a body of work that cannot and should not be ignored.
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Summary: Must read for the serious history student of the 60's.
Review: Growing up in the same era as David Horowitz, his masterful autobiography takes me to my own living room conjuring up discussions between my own parents and their friends. Having been raised in a conservative family, Mr. Horowitz's memoirs gives me a voyeuristic look into the "other side." Wow! Its more than just a feeling that I was right all along, its a peace offering for misunderstandings in perhaps the most complicated era of our times.
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Summary: Horowitz has done what few on the Left have had the courage
Review: to do: admit to a fundamental error in political philosophy, personal weltanshaunng, and thinking in general. To find out that you - we - had it wrong is one thing. To write a book about the perils of coming to one's senses and leaving the Left behind is to put one's head into the guillotine of public opinion. No one has been more villified by the wailing harpies of the elitist Left than Mr. Horowitz. They, predictable to the end, have turned on him much as they turned on Mario Vargas-Llosa, the brilliant Peruvian writer who saw the light and paid the price. But like Vargas-Llosa Horowitz has his personal center defined and measured, he knows who he is and where he stands. As Vargas-Llosa has not only weathered the attacks by former comrades such as Castro-propagandist Gabriel Garcia-Marquez but has thrived in the process, so it seems, has Mr. Horowitz. His book is a dramatic and well-written discourse on his personal oddysey as well as a primer on the way the Left ! works in our culture today. His revelations of the internal miscreance and malfeasance by the so-called New Left (and especially the thugs who made up the Black Panther Party for whom Mr. Horowitz was a "useful Jew") to which many of us were attracted in the 60's, are stunning, even to those of us who thought we knew what was going on. Whether you're a "Second Thoughter" or still a true believer, this book is something you should read. Perhaps even more important than blowing away the pixie dust from the "progressive" Left's moral posturing and narcissistic self-regard, is the unflinching evaluation of the tortured psychological underpinnings that create and nurture leftism in the first place. Horowitz can be seen in his torment trying to make sense of a senseless world and coming to terms with a cold and distant father...a grim, unyielding, and ultimately broken American Communist Party member who hated the country which had guaranteed his fre! edom and security and to which he had fled from a crumbling! , violent and anti-semitic Russia. There is angst and revelation here in equal measure. This is a book that deserves a place on anyone's bookshelf.
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Summary: Excellent diary of real purpose of communism
Review: Outstanding! Being myself a refugee from communist country, I can't never be grateful enough to have the privilege to work and live in this most free country under the Sun. It makes me sad, however, to see how all these do-gooders (starting with liberals, leftists, socialist and outright communists) are trying to successfully destroy America and all what made it so great. All in name of better future, of changing human nature. Laws of nature are to be respected, not to forcefully change what's human. It took Horowitz long time but fortunately he realized what a criminal scam socialism and communism is (if nothing else, then at least 120 million killed only during this century in the name of bright future of socialism and communism - Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol-Pot,...). Great book, should be on reading list of every high school so kids can learn what real goals are behind liberal politics. P.S.: It made me sick to read how his parents, immigrants from Soviet Union to "promised land" are trying to destroy US in order to let their communist ideology win.
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Summary: Fascinating details, weak analysis
Review: A beautifully written and captivating autobiography which is invaluable for the dirt it dishes out on prominent 60s leftists. But in his guilt over his own mistakes and his ongoing narcissism, Horowitz forgets that the hard left was a small part of much larger movements that helped push American society and civilization toward its current unparalleled heights. While leftists managed to attain prominent roles in feminist, civil rights, and gay rights organizations, their plans to use them to promote revolution were hardly sucessful. In the end it was the leftists who ended up bitter and feeling used as their energy and organization skills were coopted by the mainstream of liberal and moderate Americans. As we sit here in an unprecedented golden age, the question is surely not what went wrong in the 60s, but how America successfully managed such important social changes while rejecting the craziness offered by Horowitz and his comrades. But nowhere in this book will you find any acknowledgement of the real progress that happened in America during this period, much less a serious analysis of the positive and negative contributions of leftists too it. Reading this mesmerizing book, one wishes Horowitz could see a bigger picture than his guilt and absolutist tendencies allow, but the picture he does provide is an essential counterweight to the equally biased images offered elsewhere.
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Summary: Insight into the Marxist thought process.
Review: My reading of Radical Son was quite useful in that it provided me with an insight into the thinking that would lead someone to hold on to his commitment to Marxism. Horowitz arrived at his political position in a rather conventional manner - like many of us. he followed the political traditions of his parents. And like many, he was faced with dealing with the contradictions between instilled beliefs and the reality around him. To hold to his belief in Marxism, Horowitz had to a fundamental intellectual flaw. He had to accept teachings of Marx about human nature which are contrary to all of his observation around him. An interesting phrase that Horowitz used was "a fairy tale for adults", borrowed from Freud. It naturally follows that Marxists who are dedicated to these teachings will attempt to apply them to society. And since they are not consistent with human behavior, coersion is necessary. It was at this point that Horowitz, like many fellow Marxist idealists failed. He did not have the second critical flaw required of a committed marxist - the moral flaw which permits one to overlook the use of force, including murder, to attain an abstract goal. I think it is useful to judge marxist-communists of the Thirties, Forties, and even up to today using these criteria. Those that chose Marxism had a fundamental intellectual flaw. those that held on to Marxism in the face of the evidence of murder of 10s of millions had/have a fundamental and more dangerous moral flaw. Those that rationalize Marxism as some sort of unattained or unattainable ideal, and their supporters as slightly misguided idealists overlook these flaws of character and mind. Marxists are not different from past "idealists" that espoused ideologies such as Naxism, Facism or racial superiority - and they should be dealt with similarly. A reading of a book "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer" provides a similar perspective on this form of idealism.
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Summary: A man in need of mirroring.
Review: Kicking the sixties is like beating an enbalmed fun but foolish dog buried years ago. Horowitz changes his allegiances like so many of his fellow fair weather soldiers of the left. The problem is you can't shut these people up. What is a man to do be villified or deified? Liberal is like the F word these days. The best way write and get published is to be a disenchanted Jewish liberal who just cant't deal with the nasty excesses and guilt of the left, or a Black intellectual seething with vitriol against the "jive time homeys of welfare land" (these diatribes reek with psychic defenses such as "identification with the aggressor") I'm tired of disengenuous arguments particularly those who used the sixties as a timely bomb-shelter from the fierce consequences of Vietnam. I shudder at the implicit comparisons of the anal self seving tantrunms of the swinish "demonstators" in Chicago to combat in Vietnam. I blame the media and people like Horowitz for expressions such as "The War at Home" Horowitz's smug expressions and tortured intellect in 60s coffee houses do not qualify his as a martyr. Real martyrs suffer, bleed and feel the pain of others... Davy boy seems quite adept at feeling his own.
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Summary: The final epitaph for the cold, dead body of the Left.
Review: Davids amazing journey through the intellectual wasteland of the Left has left no stone unturned. There cannot be one left-wing intellectual left intact after reading this book. I will forever frame my vision of contemporary politics through the lens David has so masterfully created.
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Summary: Story of a man's family and his life.
Review: Excellent human interest story: triumphs,tragedies, the road chosen and where that roadwent. The author was raised in a Communist family in America, and this starting point makes the book unique. Of course the political battles in a time and place where emotions were hot, and expectations high, occupy center stage. I think the author is honest and trys to be fair to the other lives that touched his. The philosophical disputes have not gone away and the other people in the story are not happy to have a critical look at the 1960's. {No surprise, honesty is often painful.} Put aside who did what to whom back when. I found the author's life, good and bad, a moving and interesting story.
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