Commies

Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to May Day celebrations by his communist parents with a Soviet flag stuck in his baby carriage. Then came education at New York's 'little red schoolhouse'. Summers at 'commie camp'. And college at the University of Wisconsin where he became a founding father of the New Left. This book is a brilliant memoir of growing up in the culture of radicalism. But it also about the hard decisions faced by those professing a radical faith. For Radosh himself, the crisis came when he concluded in his authoritative book on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that the couple (in whose behalf he had demonstrated as a boy) had indeed been guilty of spying. Attacked as a 'traitor', Radosh began to question his political commitments. His disillusionment climaxed in the 1980s when he travelled through Central America as a journalist and historian and ran into his old comrades there still searching for the revolution.