No comments about Orwell.

No comments about Autobiography of My Dead Brother.

5 comments about Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

1. This biography of a 1960's new left radical traces his journey from idealism's promise to its ugly reality. Born in 1939 and raised by communist parents his early years were surrounded by an ideology that permeated every aspect of his life. His transformation from his leftist past to Conservatism came at great struggle over many years. Rarely is an individual given to such total introspection, that he is able to see the self delusion and denial of reality that had motivated his political life since the beginning.
   
   Horowitz' life grabs the reader with its intensity of feeling, drawing the reader into the emotions of disillusionment and guilt, fear, and failure. Through years of working with the Black Panthers, questioning the dichotomy between what was claimed and what was really happening, brought him to an awakening. He began to see that Socialism, what the new left was calling Progressive or Liberal, was not compatible with freedom. He realized that it can only be sustained by totalitarianism because it is contrary to human nature. This new understanding had been growing in him but it was a monstrous event that provided the final jarring reality that broke his attachment to an ideology that was nothing but a lies and empty idealism.
   
   Horowitz torturous journey will stir the reader to empathy, understanding, and appreciation for a man with great courage. He goes through the fire of self-recrimination, to a place where he had to let go of all his previous beliefs and admit that he and his entire social, political, and career community had been wrong. The reader will also admire his courage to stand up against the hate, the criticism, the threats, and the attempts to destroy him from his former colleagues. He is an extraordinary human being. I highly recommend this book.



2. A fascinating biography by a former radical Marxist who saw the light and became one of the most superb conservative commentators of our time. Horowitz started having second thoughts about Marxism when a female colleague was murdered by other Marxists in the San Francisco bay area. The book covers Horowitz transition in gripping detail. Few write about the left like Horowitz does because few know the left like he does. A 'do not miss' read...



3. It falls short of classic, but frankly this is one of the most mind-altering things I've ever read. It's the closest I've ever gotten into the mind of a conservative (I'm a proud center-liberal), and it makes utterly believable a thesis I would have formerly thought ridiculous: that the bases for modern liberal thought, that universal human unity is necessary in order to avoid environmental or nuclear extinction, are lies manufactured by homegrown agents of Soviet Communism who populate modern journalism and academia.
   
   Horowitz never explicitly makes this claim, and that is the supreme flaw of the book. He leads you convincingly enough through his disillusionment with 60's student radicalism, and presents a detailed case that its roots lie with children of communists, like Horowitz himself. His account of the Black Panthers and the experience that would become his turning point make riveting reading. But, as others have pointed out, the narrative breaks down toward the end of the book. I was with him up to the point where he is coming to an acceptance of the inevitable persistence and humanity of markets, hierarchies, inequalities, etc. But the path out of the center left to the far right pronouncements of the latter third of the book is frustratingly spotty. The incendiary David Horowitz of Front Page Mag. fame pops up infrequently delivering party line zingers almost out of nowhere.
   
   This is especially frustrating for me, as Horowitz' growing fascination with the right during the 80's and 90's parallels a time when my parents were moving away from Reagan toward the left as they felt the growing influence of the similarly radical (as Horowitz admits) Goldwater republican movement. The appeal that this movement would have for Horowitz is strangely missing from the book. Horowitz briefly but memorably recounts the rebirth and justification of his firebrand rhetorical style, but doesn't expound on the conviction behind his latest ravings. He mentions authoritarian puritanical goons within the conservative movement, and never really retracts those statements, but, if they are really goons, why does he not distance himself from them? It's almost like a Straussian secret writing. So either he's paid or threatened to write his current outrageous stuff, OR
   
   ... and here I assume the thesis above. Horowitz ignores most of the arguments of the contemporary left, because they inevitably originate in an international community of academics and journalists who want America to be a socialist state simply because they grew up sons and daughters and friends of communists. The thing is, he might just be correct... and from now on, my life is going to be dedicated to finding out. If he isn't correct, I hope he lives long enough to be jarred once more out of a beautiful political dream.



4. I wish I had read this years ago! As cultural history, Radical Son is as monumental as the Diary of Anne Frank - but Horowitz' autobiography is a literary masterpiece in its own right. Most importantly, Radical Son is one of the few honestly historical accounts of the campus movement that changed America from the inside out - and left Marxism as the official religion of our universities.
   
   If you wonder what our current presidential candidates mean when they call themselves "progressive" - then you really, REALLY need to read this book.



5. I had always been disappointed by the memoirs of political figures on the left because of their inability to reflect on themselves---to even attempt to understand why they had seen the world the way they had, and how their visions had affected who they were. I did not think this omission accidental. If radicalism was a displacement of personal grievance, it wasn't surprising that radicals could not confront their interior lives. "The Left, the author eventually realized, "lived by its radical myths, which were crucial to its sense of moral superiority, of being chosen as humanity's moral vanguard." "When I looked into myself, I saw how integral my radical views were to my sense of myself and the world around me." The above words, bereft of quotes, are not mine, incidentally, but the author's too, explaining why he wrote "Radical Son": "The collapse of this faith had been inseparable from the collapse of the life I had lived. I could not conceive of an autobiographical work that would not attempt to plumb this connection." Mr. Horowitz was the child of Communists, was inculcated into this faith, as it were. The real bounties his parents had achieved in America, the author states, hardly impressed them. "Success like theirs was so common that they took it for granted. What my family longed for," rather, he writes herein, "was an impossible fantasy: that mankind would be released from history, which included individual success and failure; their ambition was that poverty and inequality would disappear from the earth. To realize this fantasy they dedicated themselves to the Communist cause."
   
   Mr. Horowitz's parents were Jewish, and like Marx and Spinoza were "of Judaism but not in it" and whose outsider status had led to their revolutionary views."
   
   It's interesting moreover how many Marxist sympathizers were Jewish as well. It was believed by such folk that "Socialism would `solve' the Jewish question by eliminating Judaism, along with other ethnic and national identities." "What we had to ask ourselves,' Horowitz once explained at a public forum, "was whether Marx wasn't a self-hating Jew, and whether socialism was anything more than a wish to be included."
   
   "Fusion and unity---this was the cry of my father's Communist heart, writes the author herein, "His unquenchable longing to belong."
   
   For many years Mr. Horowitz was also a Communist, becoming eventually a prominent writer and figure of the 1960s Left, himself focusing as he did "on the issues of equality and freedom that once inspired [him] as a radical." Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 shook many Communists, but Horowitz states that, at the time, "I was not sure what to make of it all. Monstrous crimes had been committed, and much else had gone terribly wrong. But did this mean it was necessary to abandon socialism? I was not ready for that," he writes herein. "The socialist vision provided the only way I knew of looking at the world that would distinguish right from wrong that gave hope for a better future. Socialism was the desire for justice. I did not see how I could give that up."
   
   So it wasn't surprising when he took another leap of faith when a "New Left" began forming out of the ashes of the old; participants like Horowitz, doing so, "out of the conviction that the original passion could be born again, and that we could create a new socialist vision free from the taint that Stalin had placed on the movement our parents had served."
   
   Interestingly, a lot of this generation, its leaders I'm speaking about specifically, were born in red diapers, that is, were born to members of the socialist vanguard that existed in the 1920s 1930s. Hence the commonplace phrase: "Like many radicals, he was a self-exiled son of the middle class."
   
   "He was a vociferous opponent of America's war in Vietnam and any American intervention anywhere. JFK was "an arch Cold warrior, a liberal agent of the imperial ruling class," in his view. He "harangued students about the dangers of radioactive fallout, and the dark forces in Washington that were leading us to `a universal grave.'" Horowitz was also an editor of "Ramparts," the magazine of the "New Left."
   
   But the Left didn't rise up because of the Vietnam issue. Rather, the author has a different take on this topic: "My speech illustrated the real importance of Vietnam to the radical cause, which was not ultimately about Vietnam but about our own antagonism to America, our desire for revolution. Vietnam served to justify the desire; we needed the war and its violent images to vindicate our destructive intentions."
   
   The arrival on the scene of an organization such as the Black Panthers reinforced this view. Mr. Horowitz knew these people and when asked by a Panther's member to suggest someone that could help a community center run by the Panthers manage their finances he recommended fellow leftist Betty Van Patter. Betty, some speculated later, asked too many questions about the Panthers' money and as a result disappeared. "When her body finally turned up and the future was no longer unknown, I,' admitted the author, "was forced to confront myself in a way I never had to before." "I had to understand my relation to this deed, this murder of innocence, committed by my political comrades." Because the Panthers "had been made the symbol of the revolution, they could not be condemned without negative consequences for everything we stood for and had said." "I had schooled myself in Hegel and Marx, and where had they led me? I had worshipped the gods of reason, and they had delivered me into the company of killers." "Until now, my political comrades had felt like a family I could trust. We had all been recruited from the same tribe of sentiment, raging with common indignation over the injustices we perceived, and sharing visions of a retribution that would make things right." "But a mother of three, who was also one of us, had been murdered by people we knew." "There were dozens, if not hundreds, of activists with direct links to the Party...who were aware of what happened to Betty. Yet no one came forward." "This silence was more than unusual for people who normally felt compelled to protest injustices---even those that took place at the far ends of the earth." But for Betty "there was only silence." "The incident had no usable political meaning, and was therefore best forgotten."
   
   "We thought of ourselves as self-effacing, but in fact we were arrogant. We regarded ourselves as better than others from our privileged caste who were unwilling to perform the deeds we did. That was why we didn't listen and couldn't see. Like all radicals, we were intoxicated by our own virtue."
   
   And what about the media, why didn't they investigate this murder, or other murders by the Black Panthers? Or expose the issue of who filled the jails of Cuba, or Russia? Well, because, as the author eventually realized there exists an odd operating principle within the Left: "The responsibility of progressive journalists was to suppress facts that hurt the progressive cause, and to print only those truths that served it."
   
   Thus Jimmy Carter's "decision, in 1979, to let the Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua without American intervention" was cheered by journalists and those on the Left in general, but not by Mr. Horowitz. When it came time to choose between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan in 1984 (another Orwellian moment, this time in Nicaragua) the author had had enough, and voted for the first time in his life for a Republican, this while a new generation was organizing "solidarity committees" to support the Sandinistas. It was one thing to support Castro when he promised everything under the sun for Cuba but, unlike other Leftists, Mr. Horowitz couldn't continue to support Castro after it was apparent to all but the blind that "Cuba had been transformed into a totalitarian state, its economy ruined by socialist plans, its jails filled with political dissenters." "Nor was the tragedy of Cuba unique. Every socialist state created by Marxists had been transformed into an economic sinkhole and a national prison. There were no exceptions."
   
   And the Sandinistas were Marxist protégés of Castro, after all "This time, "he posited, "I could not plead ignorance of what was going to happen if radicals had their way."
   
   Having watched history unfold he came to the view "that socialists had contrived to demonstrate by bloody example what everyone else already knew: Equality and freedom are inherently in conflict. This was really all that socialist efforts had shown, over the dead bodies of millions of people. In talent, intelligence, and physical attributes, individuals were by nature different and unequal; consequently, the attempt to make them equal could only be achieved by restricting---ultimately eliminating---their individual freedom." He reflected on his own children: "The four children we had spawned were all so different in character and disposition that they posed a challenge to my radical worldview. The belief that environment shaped human destinies, and that therefore human character could be molded in some fundamental way, was essential to all utopian schemes. You could not change the world if you could not change the people in it."
   "Socialism could not even achieve the general welfare that its adherents promised. Socialist efforts to create economic equality invariably led, in practice, to the imposition of poverty on society as a whole, because socialism destroyed the incentives to produce. There were entire socialist libraries devoted to the confiscation and division of existing wealth, but not a single article on how people were motivated to create wealth. Socialists did not know how to make a society work. That was the lesson of the Communist debacle, which the Left had refused to learn. "The revolutionary failures of the Twentieth Century had demonstrated the wisdom of the American founding, and validated its tenets: private property, individual rights, and a limited state."
   
   "The idea of original sin---that we are born flawed, that the capacity for evil is lodged within us (no matter how our consciousness may be raised)---would have instilled in me a necessary caution about individuals like Huey Newton, [of the Blank Panthers] and movements like ours."
   
   "If evil was a choice that any individual could make, then human beings would always pose a danger to each other, and there could be no `withering away of the state'. There would always be a need for law above individuals, for police to enforce the law, and for prisons to contain those who broke it." After all, "how could we dispense with `bourgeois' law, the best system of rules and institutions yet devised to protect individuals from the predations of their government and each other?"
   
   Horowitz, because of this book and his outspokenness, has been demonized for having had second thoughts and has been subjected to savage personal attacks by his former comrades. The "problem" is that the world "is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age."
   
   Mr. Horowitz includes several pages of personal photographs in "Radical Son." The last page of these, interestingly, shows Mr. Horowitz with his mom, a picture of his dad alone (indicative of his lack of personal closeness with his father perhaps), and a photo of the author receiving an award from Ronald Reagan in 1991. In a way, the pictures seem to suggest the author's life; an estrangement and lack of closeness with his Marxist father, a father who never gave him his approval; a Marxist mother who eventually put family before politics; and finally, the individual, happy to accept a teaching award from a retired American president, that the author himself ultimately became.
   
   Thereafter he "become involved...with the idea of doing something of immediate benefit for people in the community." "I was tired," said he, "of pouring energy into grand abstractions like `the revolution,' and longed to see my efforts lead to practical results."

2 comments about JFK: The Kennedy Tapes, Vol. I, Original Speeches of the Presidential Years.

1. This volume was a disappointment because only portions of the various speeches are used. One would expect the complete speech including the classics (American University, Inaugural etc.) Still it is fascinating to hear one of the great modern orators making his case both domestically and internationally.



2. For somebody who was not alive in JFK's time, this seemed like a great way to get a feel for the politics and history of the 1960s. This approach, though, gives only a few minutes, five at most, of each speech and so the listener gets a famous highlight, but no depth of experience. I am excited about the primary exposure, but much more content and length is necessary for this to be of much use to a serious fan of history or politics.

2 comments about In The Absence of Angels (Bookcassette(r) Edition).

1. Elizabeth Glaser wasn't famous until she met and later married Paul Micheal Glaser of tv's Starsky and Hutch. She wsan't used to fame and notoriety, but she became accustomed to it. At the opening of the book, Elizabeth begins by telling us of complications she had when her and Paul's daughter Ariel was born. She needed many blood tranfusions from many different donors. It was in one of those transfusions that the AIDS virus was hiding. Elizabeth was infecting and she didn't even know it. She passed the deadly virus onto her daughter through breast feeding and later to her son, Jake, while he was still in her womb. In the Absence of Angels is more than just Elziabeth's story. It's the story of her children, her husband, and their struggle to find courage in the face of a losing battle. It's the story of how Elizabeth, with the help of friends and support of her husband, formed the first charity for funding research for Pediatric AIDS which until Elizabeth brought the spotlight to it because of the death of her daughter Ariel, was untouched by doctors and charities alike. It's the story of a family having to cope with the death of a very young, beautiful and precious daughter in 1988 and the inevitable death of a loving, caring wife in 1992, but it isn't a sad book. To me, it's a book of hope and strength. I highly recommend it to any and every one



2. I found this book drawing me to it, and hard to put down! an excellent story, sad but full of hope and courage! a shockingly eye opening book!-in that NO-ONE was doing anything for kids-like the glaser kids, or any others who have/had this awful disease!! a very informative book about the disease and how it affects people, especially kids. I highly RECOMMEND THIS BOOK!

1 comments about Harry Crews, a Childhood: The Biography of a Place/Readings.

1. I KNEW HARRY AND ROOMED WITH HIM ONE SUMMER SESSION AT U OF F. I HAVE SEEN HIM SEVERAL TIMES SINCE. HE SOUNDS THE SAME AS HE DID IN 1960. THE TAPE IS EXCELLENT BUT TOO SHORT AND CONTAINS A VERY GRAPHIC BUT SMALL PART OF HIS LIFE STORY. HARRY READS SO WELL I WISH HE WOULD DO SOME MORE RECORDINGS.

No comments about Martin Luther Heretic.

5 comments about Outwitting the Gestapo.

1. Outwitting the Gestapo is the real life experience of one woman's determination, at all costs, to save her husband, her true other half, from execution by the infamous Klaus Barbie, "Butcher of Lyon." That is what makes it so compelling. I was drawn to this memoir, written in diary form, from May 14, 1943 through February 12, 1944, because I had seen the French film, * Lucie Aubrac *. A gorgeous film, that follows the same experience as this book, I was left wanting more. I was richly rewarded by reading this intimate revelation of the French Resistance and the couple who are equally committed to each other and the freedom of France. This story is a vivid portrait of devotion and fortitude. Raymond, Lucie Aubrac's husband, and the father of her young son and the child she carries in her womb, is arrested and sentenced to die. Lucie has been involved with the resistance since its beginning, but with the advent of this new ordeal, she masterminds a terrifying attempt to free her beloved husband. With her "buddies" in the resistance, a plan is orchestrated that involves the increasingly expanding Lucie to have almost daily contact with Klaus Barbie. Singlehandedly, she attempts to convince this monster to allow a contact with Raymond, making Barbie believe that she is an unwed mother who must marry Raymond to give her child a name. Constantly changing names and domains, Lucie and the other members of the resistance live with the constant fear of being caught, yet nothing inteferes with their goals. Their unflinching resolve is what makes for true heroism; their dedication to each other redefines friendship for me. The film is indeed beautiful, but it is in many ways short-sighted. There is so much more to this story than is presented on celluloid. Lucie Aubrac tells her remarkable story while enveloping her comrades into her heart, and presents the reader with the depth of her love for Raymond and France. This book gives a more complete picture of France and the Resistance, and of course, the love that many people would want to die for. Outwitting the Gestapo gave me a deep feeling of satisfaction.



2. Lucie Aubrac's first hand account of her "career" as a key member of the French resistance in the city of Lyon can't help but evoke an emotional connection between the author's gripping story and the reader sitting in comfort at home. I mostly second all that the previous reviewer lauded. The story itself is compelling, and the glimpse that it offers of a woman's struggle to balance the cares of wife, mother, "girlfriend," "fiancee," patriot, etc., provides a much needed balance to our understanding of the total effects of a conflict such as WWII. The personalness of the book is perhaps its greatest strength.

   The translation is extremely fluid and detracts not at all from the author's tale.

   Some criticism to keep in the back of the mind: it could simply be the author's purpose, however, I was struck by the seeming lack of concern of being caught -- until the end of the book (I won't spoil it for you). Lucie's life seems to be minimally impacted by her resistance ties. Like I said, maybe she left out those details on purpose, I don't know. The other thing the "bothered" me was the unconvincing account of how she was able to arrange for the purchase of silencers in Switzerland, travel to Switzerland to pick up the silencers, and then recross the border the same day without arousing suspicion. I doubt she was able to pick up the telephone and call a gun dealer to arrange the transaction -- maybe I missed it. Whatever, just something to consider.

   On the whole, I heartily endorse this book; it is exciting without being Bond-ish, and it is personal without being too proximate. Furthermore, it convincingly demonstrates the various motives of resistance, and it illustrates the fact that even a single person can make a difference in a struggle as vast as a world at war.




3. Lucie Aubrac captivated me. She writes about facts with the warmth of a woman who is dedicated to the Resistance, to her husband, and to her child. When you read this you are plunged into the French Resistance almost as if you had been there!!!



4. ..Set in Lyon after the Germans had invaded the southern 'zone libre' this book purports to be a diary, written during a nine month period of 1943 by one of the most France's most famous resistance 'personalities'. Claude Berri's acclaimed 1995 film 'Lucie Aubrac' was based on the events described. As a number of reviewers have already remarked , many scenes in this account appear to have been directly conjured up from the author's imagination and the Aubracs themselves, subject to media scrutiny as France's resistance history is increasingly put under the microscope have admitted that this book is indeed part novelisation. Translated from the French 'Ils partiront dans l'ivresse' the author revels in her self portrayal as mother, heroine, & machine gun toting guerilla fighter and resistance cell leader. No where does she state that she and her husband were leading lights in a communist resistance grouping and no light is shed at all on what their role might have been in the capture by the Gestapo of De Gaulle's envoy and resistance unifier Jean Moulin in Caluire, a suburb of Lyon during June 1943. One of the main espisodes of the book is Aubrac's attempt to liberate her husband, captured at the same time as Moulin and held by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. The facility with which she is able to come and go from Gestapo headquarters in Lyon has led more than one writer to question whether or not the Aubracs were indeed on Barbie's payroll; either that or many elements of Raymond Aubrac's subsequent escape are pure invention. Of course Klaus Barbie muddied the waters somewhat at his trial in the late 80's but the brutal portrayal of him here simply begs the question...how could he possibly have been taken in as Aubrac suggests. Post Liberation, Aubrac's husband oversaw the 'épuration' or cleansing in and around Marseilles and effectively presided over a killing spree as suspected collaborators were ruthlessly hunted out of French society and summarily executed in many cases. Facts that sit uneasily with the rather rose-tinted view of resistance presented here...In France the Aubrac's are still taking to court authors who question the veracity of their accounts...



5. This "diary" was written 40 years after the events, so given that memories fade or are embellished, it's a little hard to know what to believe. I was hoping for another "Berlin Diaries" by Marie Vassiltchikov, but alas, it doesn't come close. A good editor was needed here because names are tossed around with little or no explanation, plus though it's in diary form, there are many lengthy flashbacks, making it confusing at times as to what is actually going on. You really don't know who half the people are but if you just forget about that and go with the story, it doesn't really matter. The other reviewers admirably described what Lucie Aubrac accomplished. Even if Raymond was a Nazi informer, as has been intimated, I don't think Lucie could have ever known or believed it. She is remarkable in that she doesn't just accept her husband's death sentence, she thinks up a clever plan to rescue him. She is tenacious and despite setback after setback, she just keeps focused. Unlike the Germans, Austrians, Belgians, etc., the French have had a very good public relations campaign to perpetuate the belief that just about everyone was in the Resistance. Of course now we know that only a small percentage of the populace were actively in the French Resistance. Lucie's book is a little biased--she rarely encounters anyone who doesn't feel the way she does. She takes few precautions and doesn't seem to be afraid of being caught. And sometimes it is hard to believe what she gets away with--you wonder if she really was as fearless as she portrays herself. Still, it's a good story and shows what people are capable of if they refuse to sit on the sidelines.

2 comments about Getting to Know William Shakespeare (Road Scholar, 1).

1. My whole family enjoyed Getting to Know William Shakespeare. We loved the music, the analysis of his plays, and the interesting facts about his life. The professors on the CD make Shakespeare very accessable to all of us with funny stories and interesting historical background. If you don't know anything about him, you will find this great to listen to. And if you have read his plays, you will also learn something about his craft. The CD is very entertaining. I highly recommend it.



2. This cd is a great way for families to make good use of downtime spent in cars. It combines biographical detail (kids will be fascinated by such everyday Elizabethan images as traitors' heads on spikes on London's Tower Bridge) with fascinating literary and cultural analysis (rap-weary parents will be intellectually intrigued). Quotations from premier academic authorities are interspersed with appropriate period music and short excerpts from the Bard himself. It flows like an NPR report, and you may find yourself sitting in the car to finish it even after you've reached your destination!

No comments about Stories Of Survival: Mountaineering & Exploration.