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A Good American Family
The Red Scare and My Father
1 of 1 copy available
Elliott Maraniss, David's father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.
In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father's story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital 20th-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. "Remarkably balanced, forthright, and unwavering in its search for the truth" (The New York Times), A Good American Family evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is "clear-eyed and empathetic" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 14, 2019 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781508282778
- File size: 394868 KB
- Duration: 13:42:38
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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David Maraniss's homage to his father is a fascinating combination of moving parts: an insider's window on the Commie scare of the mid-twentieth century, an engaging character study of his elusive father, and a picture of family life as it struggles through earth-shattering upheaval. But as gifted as Maraniss may be when it comes to writing, narrating is not his forte. At times, his voice sounds strangely unenthusiastic. In fact, so sharp is the contrast between the rabid curiosity of the writer's voice on the page (so to speak) and the writer's voice through one's headphones that it's a challenge to understand that they are, if fact, the same person. Maraniss's story is proof of two things. If you have a good story, definitely tell it. And if you have a good story, maybe don't narrate it yourself? Z.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from February 11, 2019
Communism was as American as apple pie, according to this searching account of a family’s Cold War ideological journey. Pulitzer-winning Washington Post editor Maraniss (Barack Obama) recounts his father Elliott’s 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth to duck questions about his past membership in the Communist Party but offered an impassioned defense of his constitutional rights; he was fired from his job at a Detroit newspaper and blacklisted for several years. Drawing on Elliott’s essays, letters, and FBI files, Maraniss explores his family history—his uncle, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and mother were also Communists—to show how politics molded individual lives as his father evolved from a left-wing student journalist, idealistic but subservient to the Stalinist party line, to an officer who fought racism in the army in WWII, to a rueful ex-communist liberal who voted for Eisenhower. Maraniss also weaves in insightful studies of other figures in the post-war Red Scare, including his father’s African-American attorney George Crockett, who defended communists as allies against Jim Crow, and the grandmotherly FBI informant who denounced Elliott. Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas.
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