Rating: 
Summary: Reviwer Actually Read Book
Review: ....
While this latest effort from the prolific Horowitz certainly contains autobiographical material, as one would expect of a book that follows an activist's ideological journey, it is really much more than that. The scope of the chapters range from the very specific (e.g., the propriety of reparations) to the demonstrated failings of ultra liberal, socialist or communist policies over the past century(as well as where they may well take us in the future if allowed to flourish). Conservatives will find their beliefs & suspicions reinforced by much of what the author writes. His appeal, however, lies not in simply stating time-worn principles from Conservatism 101. Horowitz has an uncanny knack for demanding of liberals the same consistency--in their theories/policies and the application of them--that they demand of others. He exposes demonstrably false assumptions, shows how they corrupt otherwise worthy goals, and in many instances work against the end they seek to achieve.
If there is one book I would buy in a minute after having read this one, it is a genuine, intellectually honest literary effort by Horowitz's opponents that exposes the factual or logical errors in Left Illusions. I suspect it would be a daunting task. I do not expect to see one. It is much easier to stick a label on someone, whether it be an accurate one or not, than take on discomforting facts that don't accommodate one's worldview. Horowitz has devoted countless hours and hundreds of pages documenting the errors of his past; not so much what he wanted for his fellow man, but how best it could be achieved. It's too bad some people are more interested in silencing or marginalizing him than in rebutting him and his work. I do understand their reluctance to take on that assignment, however. Name-calling has always been easier than debating.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Expose of the Hypocrisy of the Left
Review: As I read the author's accounts (actually a series of personal essays) of his gradual transformation from radical to conservative I found myself reliving my own metamorphosis, albeit with a blander backdrop.Horowitz writes lucidly without resorting to diatribe. He is far from a party hack which Orwell, whom he often cites in this work, would have appreciated. He is incisive and passionate in his views without resorting to polemics. Above all, he is logical and informed in his opinions by good old common sense. His essay on the lack of diversity on college campuses, especially as it relates to the funding and support for student organizations, is alone worth the price of the book. He makes a very compelling case for the left-wing McCarthyism that now pervades academia. The book is arranged chronologically, allowing the uninitiated reader to consider his ideological transition in the historical context of contemporary American life. Unfortunately, while this work should be required reading in many an undergraduate political course, it isn't likely to see the light of day in the halls of ivy, reconfirming the author's belief that most academics no longer sift and winnow in their supposed search for truth and illumination. Horowitz is an intellectual in the best sense of the word and this work (among dozens he has scribed) will prove seminal in cementing his reputation for some future generation not chained to political correctness.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting journey
Review: David's journey was a remarkable one. A full life that has brought him from the communist party to conservative activist. Although this book is more of a biography and life-story, the ideas he expoused decades ago are still important to him today. he just realized that the liberal ways of confronting problems usually do not work, and can make things worse, even though their intentions are good. For instance, conservatives have been labeled as uncaring of the poor and the 'welfare mothers' and demonized for wanting to take away their benefits when they pushed the Welfare Reform Act. However, with Bill Clinton's help, that Act has delivered the lowest rate of poverty in minority single-parent homes since Welfare was initiated -- even during this latest recession. David has realized that conservatives did not 'hate' the poor, but knew that Welfare was a trap to keep them poor and keep voting Democratic. Once he realized this as well as other political beliefs, he realized that conservatives do care as much about these things as liberals do; they just disagree on how to fix them. A very interesting read, more than just a reaffirmation of the conservative's ideals.
Rating: 
Summary: The well that never runs dry
Review: For the umpteenth time, Horowitz explains his transformation from an egomaniacal left-wing statist into an egomaniacal right-wing statist.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting journey
Review: Horowitz has edited a chronological sampling of his most provocative essays over the past forty years. Both the tone and spirit of this compilation is intellectually honest, tracing his transformation from leftist radical to moderate conservative. More importantly, he reveals the hypocrisy and arrogance of the left, especially its socialist fringe, and he challenges university faculty to reexamine their own assumptions and practices about academic freedom of speech. As a former liberal myself, I can relate to much of what he says. If only those who once embraced him on the left and in the media would give him the same benefit of the doubt now.
Rating:
Summary: A Real Page Turner
Review: I spent all weekend reading this book and could not put it down. The insights into the root causes of leftist illusions are fascinating, and are backed up by an awesome display of scholarly knowledge.
The book starts off slowly as it features some essays from Horowitz's past, but that really allows the plot to thicken in a sense, as the reader becomes engrossed in what amounts to a sort of ideological detective story as Horowitz investigates both his own motives and reasoning as well as that of his fellow leftists as he gradually frees himself from his enthrallment to Communism, then from Socialism, and finally from the left as a whole.
This is a must read for someone who is willing to look beneath the surface of politics to try and understand what makes the whole thing tick.
Rating:
Summary: A profoundly disturbing book...excellent!
Review: It is amazing how many reviewers have (apparently) not even glanced at the contents of this book, but content themselves with jargon concerning "the right" and "the left." These people should be sentenced to three months studying Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."
There are a couple of essays in this book dealing with the AIDS epidemic that I (as a gay man) could have written myself. Horowitz bluntly makes the claim that allowing leftist politics to interfere with well-known methods of controlling epidemics was a blunder that caused millions of deaths. I have felt this exact same way since 1981, and yet have been unable to get a hearing in any part of the "gay community." At the very least, I felt it was high time to take a break from anal intercourse, say for ten years, and see if the HIV virus would manage to become extinct.
This has not happened.
Is this really an issue about "right" and "left?" Explain this to me again, please....
The other profoundly disturbing point made -- is to my mind undebatable. I grew up in the 50's, and have lived to see a strong, even tyrannical, government, busily policing the hiring policies of "evil corporations" to make sure that no nasty discrimination is taking place. Civil rights and affirmative action have led us to the point where almost all corporations are acting on quotas, or actively preparing legal arguments to validate their hiring decisions.
And this all seems to me, on balance, a good thing. Nobody should be automatically rejected because of race, color, creed, etc.
Except for one place...
Where suddenly some animals are much more equal than others....
Our universities. The faculty at our universities is now running about 95 - 100% Democratic, and for decades they have been OPENLY hiring on political grounds. Horowitz has the numbers, and the facts -- how a scholar of Chinese history was rejected when, during lunch, he revealed that he favored school vouchers!!
So -- nobody shall be rejected on grounds of "creed" -- except by Democrats running a totalitarian faculty in American universities!! Mind-boggling!!!
Hey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, make your move! Announce civil-rights lawsuits against the University of California on Monday, and the California State Universities on Tuesday. Make it clear that huge fines will be involved, as well as jail sentences. How can these people simply thumb their noses at the very laws they wrote??
The book is VERY highly recommended!!
Rating:
Summary: For the open-minded
Review: Left Illusions is one of the most important compilations of political and social commentary to have been published in recent years. David Horowitz provides the reader with a unique perspective of political life on both the left and the conservative right. For half of his life he was one of the most prominent American leftists. He helped establish the New Left - a movement that sought to dissociate the socialist dream from the gulags of Stalin - and committed himself in various ways to its cause: organizing the first anti-war rally at Berkeley, editing the left's most definitive periodicals, and aiding such organizations as the Black Panthers. Personal tragedy (the murder of a close friend at the hands of the Black Panther, and the subsequent cover-up by the entire left community) made him deeply question his ideological commtiments, and after a period of several years, he emerged again as a figure of the conservative right.
It is a sad fact about the state of political discourse (especially on college campuses) that people of the left automatically brand people of the right as racists, bigots, fascists and sexist pigs. Read this book - it will disabuse you of such preposterous notions (if you indeed believe in them). Though there are a few prominent right wing nuts (usually derided by other conservatives) you will quite clearly see the left's utter hypocrisy in levelling these accusations. With a clear, rational analysis - supported by facts - and made very readable by his lucid writing, Horowitz covers a broad range of issues in his debate with the left. He writes of their willingness to support the world's most oppressive regimes, and downplay or turn a blind eye to the deaths of millions (such as after the Vietnam War, the slaughter by the North Vietnamese government and also Pol Pot's regime - under these regimes, more Indochinese countrymen died in three years than they had in the thirteen prior years of war). He discusses the untenable nature of the socialist dream and how that dream has assumed various guises both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union; the Marxist doctrine is bound to be destructive when applied to the real world, as predicted even by certain prominent contemporaries of Marx and seen by every regime that has espoused those doctrines (though again, the left pointedly does not learn from history and the deaths of millions and the oppression of millions more). There are essays on the dominance of the left in our culture, particularly in academia, where college conservative groups receive contempt and scant funding from administrators and other student groups, and professors regularly teach only the left side of the argument and demand that students adhere to left opinions while writing assignments for class; I had known of the bias on campuses before reading this book, but reading the statistical figures and personal experiences shocked me - so many college students graduate without being encouraged in independent thought and inquiry and without ever hearing both sides of the debate. You will also be able to read Horowitz's debate on the reparations issue (one of the many debates in which his opponents unfairly smeared him); here you can see what he actually wrote and judge for yourself.
In any case, if you are open-minded and wish to read one of the most insightful political analysts around, pick up this book. The compilation of essays and excerpts, taken from an assortment of Horowitz's work, will not only show you his progression from radical leftist to member of the conservative right, it will force you to see certain issues in a new light and understand that conservatives - far from being the narrow-minded, hateful oppressors the left ironically brands them as - are for the most part a diverse body of people committed to a kind of classic liberalism: upholding private property, wishing for less government interference in private life, and championing individual rights and individual enterprise... among several other key principles.
Rating: 
Summary: The pitter-patter of little minds....
Review: Like a white, suburban feminist of the '70s who becomes 'born again' into Christian fundamentalism and writes to expose the errors of feminism as a whole (leaving out the experience, knowledge, and insights of the bulk of the tradition), Horowitz accomplishes something, but far less than he or his celebrators would have you believe. Ultimately, that the political left is 'owned' by the communists/fellow travellers of his past is the underexamined assumption that underpins too much of his analysis. While many of his insights are spot on, they exist in a disjointed series of isolated critiques that he and his editors attempt to link together into a (illusionary) unified whole. While it's not clear how much of this book is mere self-therapy for its author,it does manage to provide warm fuzzies for ideologues on the right, a cathartic punching-bag for stridents on the left, but precious little for the masses who have to live in the middle.
Rating:
Summary: Making it through the fog
Review: Like Whittaker Chambers before him, David Horowitz must have thought he was abandoning the winning side for the losing side, when he embraced conservatism. Chambers left Communism for Christianity, at a time when, in the eyes of many, it was not expedient to do so. So too, Horowitz, a leading leftwing intellectual of the 60s and 70s, had second thoughts. For both men, the change in thinking was costly, with severe reactions to their defections. This book, a collection of articles, most of which were published before, gives us an intellectual history of Horowitz's rise in the Left, and his eventual disaffection with it. Thus it includes some of his earlier leftist pieces, including some published in the radical Ramparts, which he formerly edited. But the bulk of the articles here come from his new found conservatism, and feature some of his best writings from the late 70s to 2003. Howorwitz has already covered his second thoughts in book form, especially in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (co-written with Peter Collier in 1989), and Radical Son (1997). Here he covers a wide range of issues, with all of the conservative battlegrounds given a run. Thus some three decades worth of controversy are covered, with articles on Solzhenitsyn, Nicaragua, racism, political correctness on campus, AIDS, free speech, multiculturalism, the Middle East crisis, terrorism, and the Clinton years all given judicious treatment. Unlike Chambers, it was not a religious conversion that prompted this change of heart. It was a growing awareness that the Left was simply hypocritical, constantly denouncing supposed atrocities of capitalism and American foreign policy, while ignoring or condoning the barbarism of socialism and leftist dictatorships. An enormous amount of human blood had been shed on the altars of leftist utopianism, Horowitz discovered. Thus as someone who has been there and done that, his criticisms of the left deserve to be heard. Not many have renounced their leftwing past. I happen to have been one to do so, but there are not that many around. Irving Kristol once said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. It seems that may leftists prefer to live with their illusions than take a stand for reality. Horowitz chronicles the extreme reaction of fellow leftists to his realignment. He was hoping that others would see the light, but instead he received vitriol, censure and abuse. He had hoped that other radicals would make this acknowledgment: "We greatly exaggerated the sins of America and underestimated its decencies and virtues, and we're sorry". But such confessions were few and far between. Most leftists clung to their utopianism, to the "god that failed". Like Chambers, his new found conservatism is still a minority position. There exists a left-liberalism hegemony in the US and the West that makes it hard for countering views to be heard. Horowitz documents the uphill battle in promoting a conservative voice in such a climate. Thus one has to ask why anyone would want to surrender a seemingly winning position for what appears to be a lost cause. Horowitz has asked himself this question many times, as had Chambers. His last lines in this book address the question again, as he asks whether the truth will continue to remain in the shadows. He hopes that it won't. And for those like myself who have followed a similar road, and have taken similar U-turns, one's hopes are buoyed by knowing that one is not alone, and that others have made similar journeys. Horowitz retains his Jewish faith. Chambers, and I, embraced Christianity. But all three of us know that truth is powerful, and truth will prevail. This volume provides solid meat for those who have made the change, and for those who have not yet done so. May it result in many more second thoughts.
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