Summer reading of note

Finished a couple of books in the last week, both worth the time and money. Ronald Radosh's Commies is an entertaining, name-dropping autobiography of life in the "Old Left, New Left, and Leftover Left." He plainly spells out the communist affinities of most American left-wing organizations in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and rather honestly describes his slow "conversion" in the 70s and 80s to "loving America." The only drawback to the work is lack of comtemporary relfection; in other words, I was left wanting a bit more commentary on where Radosh is now (intellectually) and what life is like amid the ex-lefties like David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and the like. But his mention of (among others) Peter, Paul, and Mary, Eric Foner, and Eugene Genovese makes Commies a riveting read.

I also managed to finish Roger Kimball's The Long March, another retrospective on the 60s, albeit from a different perspective. Whereas Radosh speaks from former advocacy of ninny New Left ideas, Kimball speaks from a life-long hatred of the same. Long March is intellectually "thicker" and, in a sense, more damning with its voluminous evidence of vacuous left-wing commentary from the likes of Susan Sontag, William Sloane Coffin, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman Mailer among many others. Indeed, the very volume of stupidity makes the book tedious at times; I found myself unconsciously skimming quotations and paragraphs, muttering to myself, "more of the same ... stupid, crazy, dangerous ... more of the same..." Still, the case against ever again listening to these left-luminaries is solidly made, and Kimball's case is worth the effort.