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Summary: An extremely perceptive and well written book
Review: Horowitz has written an extremely perceptive, well written andsometimes introspective autobiography. The book's candid explanationof the psychological roots of first communism and then the New Left are very enlightening. As a student at Cal Berkeley myself in the late sixties (although I was not a radical, one couldn't help but be affected by the swirl of events), the chapters on Horowitz' experiences with and ultimately rejection of the New Left were particularly poignant for me. Horowitz is not only insightful about politics and his own life, he has an excellent command of the English language. I just couldn't put this book down.
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Summary: Amazon's Reveiw is BS. Buy and study this book!
Review: One of the best, if not the best, books ever written about the"new left". Horowitz reveals the depths of his own personalagony as he awakened from the tunnel vision dreamworld of leftism to the brutal reality of communism internationally and of so called "progressives" here at home. The book is written with great humility and frankness which does not seek to hide his own frailties and mistakes (nor, to the dismay of people like the one who wrote the amazon review, review, doesn't hide the self serving duplicity, lies and dogmatism of many of the left's "leading lights" such as Tom Haydem, Tod Gitlin, Angela Davis, Julianne Malveaux, Paul Berman,Bob Scheer, etc. Just as notable as its revelations about what these people knew and have kept quiet about (to this day) is Horowitz's own development from a rigid, orthodox "red baby" devoted to a cause above all other ends into a passionate, but humane advocate of the rule of law and process as the only real defense we have against oppression --- a "beourgeiose" concept despised by the people who hunger to be our oppressors: the liberal left.
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Summary: A must read for YOUNG Leftists and Socialists.
Review: "Radical Son" is one of the most important books written in this decade. The author's parents were life-long Communists and he was a New Leftist/Socialist for the first 40 years of his life. Slowly he was forced to admit to himself the nihilism of socialism. The murder of a friend by the Blank Panthers crystallized his thinking. If only this book could be read by high school students and again when they attend college, there might be some hope of ending the untrue and dangerous myths of socialism perpetuated by left-wing politicians, the mainstream media and college elites. Horowitz states, "It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now. . . . The lesson I had learned from my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst deeds. I had believed in the Left because of the good it had promised; I had learned to judge it by the evil it had done." Please do yourself and this nation a favor and read this book. It is only through education that the evils of communism and socialism can be exposed for what they really are.
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Summary: A genuinely profound autobiography
Review: Of a rare odyssey: Someone who rethinks their political beliefs from the ground up. For Horowitz, it was seeing friends murdered by 'brothers in arms' in the political Left (ie Black Panthers), that woke him up and turned him away from radical leftism.This is the most interesting political odyssey stories since Whittaker Chambers' "Witness", and there are echoes of that era in today's era, and in the two man's lives. Chambers and Horowitz both are now toasted on the right and vilified by the left, even though neither were/are cookie cutter conservatives. Their main threat to the left is they are on to the game of the Leftists. Hence the venom against Horowitz. The previous review is nonsense. Horowitz calls people Communists and Socialists because that is what they called *themselves*. Including Horowitz, who was raised as a 'red diaper' baby. "Neo-McCarthyite" hmmm. Well, KGB files now reveal that many of the 'innocents' protected by the Left were in fact certainly Soviet spies: Rosenbergs, Hiss. And that 100s of Communist spies were in the US Government. McCarthy was right more than wrong! Whatever your political leanings, this books is highly recommended. It will make you think!
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Summary: A Must-Read Political Memoir by a Former Sixties' Radical
Review: This book was so absorbing that I found it difficult to put down, reading several chapters before even leaving the bookstore. The amazon.com review of "Radical Son" does the author, David Horowitz, an injustice since every autobiography will potentially subject its author to accusations of self-absorbation, self-importance, or denial. However, contrary to that critical review, Horowitz is as painfully honest about himself and his own mistakes and personal shortcomings, as he is about those of his parents, friends, and former comrades in the New Left. "Radical Son" is much more, however, than the political mea culpa of a former Berkley radical turned Reagan conservative. It is an invaluable political history of the Sixties' New Left Movement. Horowitz chronicles how his intellectual parents and their friends-- mostly immigrants or first-generation Americans --were drawn to the Communist Party in the 1920's and 1930's; how they passed their idealism and radical beliefs on to their children before becoming disillusioned themselves after Stalin's crimes were revealed in the Khruschev Report in 1956; and how those children-- including himself, Peter Collier, Todd Gitlin, Bob Scheer, Jerry Rubin and many others --established the New Left in the early 1960's, to replace the discredited "Old Left" of their parents' generation and to rehabilitate the Marxist idea. Horowitz further points out why the revolution sought by the New Left never materialized-- the fantasy of utopian marxist-socialism could not overcome the reality of the bloody, totalitarian communist regimes. Revelations of the blood bath in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, following the communist victories there, soon reached the West. More directly, with the end of the Vietnam War, the protests and mass demonstration on campus came to an abrupt halt. The "people" were never really with the New Left after all. Still, as Horowitz writes, the New Left remains capable of inflicting damag! e. Within its "bases" in the academic and literary worlds, as well as in Hollywood, the New Left has become a sort of counter-establishment in America with the ability to rewrite history (such as Todd Gitlin's "The Sixties" and the writings of Noam Chomsky, not mention the films of Oliver Stone) and to indoctrinate-- or at least attempt to indoctrinate --college students with one-sided lectures, textbooks, and various forms of hypersensitive "political correctness".
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Summary: Great Book for understanding the Counter Culture
Review: This is the first Horowitz book I read, and it made me want to read everything he has ever written since his conversion. I have read so many books that said this is the right way and that is the wrong way. Well, Horowitz has been on both sides of the issues and he deals them both a fair hand in this autobiography. In the end he demonstrates how if the friends and family of his youth had their way, there would be no freedom, no prosperity, and and no civil rights. It reveals that everything the left claimed to want would be delivered by those on the right. And the things the left secretly wanted would horrify real Americans. Great book for those interested in the sixties counter culture. For every Chomosky "book" you read, please read a Horowitz book.
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Summary: 'Coming Home'
Review: I was first drawn to David Horowitz's Radical Son because in some ways his migration from the Left into the conservative camp was similar to my own journey. My family had always been stanch Democrats with heavy socialist leanings and I was, throughout the late 60s and into the 70s, a `hippie radical'. Mr. Horowtiz's book not only tells his life story, but also offers an accurate eyewitness account of the anti-American cause; from the 1950s vision of the Soviet `utopia', through his days as a New-Leftist radical in the 60s, and up to his involvement and subsequent fallout with the Panthers in the early 1970s. His gradual move to the Right is tested and validated with intimate reflection and revelation. I too suffered the same feelings of being lost and disillusioned, and unknowingly arrived to the same set of conclusions. This book is good reading for anyone who may have the desire and courage to test their own political convictions and principles. Personally, after reading this book, I felt refreshed, enlightened and optimistic. Perhaps borrowing from his own words best summarizes my experience - I felt as if I too was finally "Coming home".
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Summary: Exceptionally Truthful Examination of a Tumultous Time...
Review: "Radical Son" is the well-written and brutally frank story of a journey - a personal and political journey through the tumultuous 1960's and the political and cultural conflicts of the 1980's and 1990's. The author, David Horowitz, grew up in the 1940's and 1950's as a "red diaper baby." His parents posed as "progressives" which then - as now - meant those who were left of center with a socialistic tilt. However, they were actually committed communists who remained underground and supported the Soviet Union. Living a hermitically sealed life where everything was seen through the prism of their "scientific" religion, which was Stalinist-tinted Marxism, the Horowitz, parents and children, ended up as aliens in the land of their birth. Life as a "red diaper baby" seemed to be an ascetic, rather humorless existence as almost everything in these communist families was sublimated to the struggle. For years, his parents waited for the moment when they would be activated by the "party" (which we now know received its marching orders from Moscow) for some vital task. These communists were not "progressive" as they did not want to take mincing steps to create a more just society through the redistribution of wealth, but sought a revolution where private property would be abolished and everything would at last be set right by the party.
By the time that David Horowitz was ready to go off to college, Khrushchev had spoken and the truth about the Stalinist terror became undeniable. In the book he describes how communist marriages broke up and friendships ended when one person lost the faith while another stayed true to Stalin, the strong leader and creator of the "New Man" that they had worked for. So, at the dawn of the 1960's, Horowitz became part of the nascent "New Left" which consisted of young radicals who sought revolt, though not openly at first, but who wanted to leave the old Stalinist baggage behind. Some of the New Left were socialists who had the goal of creating a social democracy in the United States, but they were outnumbered by the radicals, who were led by the charismatic Tom Hayden.
After marriage and years of education at Columbia and Berkley, Horowitz, who always had his doubts about the elements of the communist program, moved to London and devoted himself to writing, in an attempt to paper over the inconsistencies in the work of Marx and Engels and to put a human face on the radical program. Returning to Berkley, he wrote for Ramparts, the voice of the New Left and immersed himself in the radical politics and the anti-war movements and was intimately involved in the alliance between the New Left and the Black Panthers. To many members of the New Left, there was a thrill, a whiff of danger that drew them to the Panthers like a moth to a flame. While virtually all of the Black Panthers were actually street thugs, opportunists who wore black leather and berets, their veneer of radical posturing made them romantic revolutionaries in the eyes of the left who had only contempt for Marlin Luther King and the Civil Rights leaders who actually accomplished something meaningful. When a secretary that Horowitz had recommended to the Panther was murdered - in a crime that has never been fully solved - he began to question many of the associations that he had made and the conclusions that he had reached.
In the aftermath of America's ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam, the New Left treated the massacres, reprisals and repression that followed with indifference or excused them away. Gradually, over these issues and the inconsistencies and contradictions of the left, Horowitz began to question his worldview and his values and gradually he and his best friend and frequent co-author Peter Collier, began to move across the political spectrum. Seeing that the freedoms promised by the communists never seemed to come and that life, despite its difficulties and injustices, was better and more prosperous for minorities in the United States, he eventually became a committed conservative. As this change in political orientation happened, Horowitz lost his old comrades in the New Left who had not lost the faith and looked upon him as a turncoat.
Instead of the concept of "economic justice" as the radical redistribution of wealth is euphemistically referred to on the left as his core belief, he began to see human freedom as the way to unlock human potential. Horowitz became an advocate of free minds, open markets and a color-blind society, an imperfect but functioning meritocracy, where opportunity would allow those whose ancestors had suffered historic injustices to succeed. He began to host "Second Thoughts Conferences" where be brought the old radicals together to question the legacy of the 1960's. By the 1990's, Horowitz was writing emphatically and prolifically about what he saw as the new injustices, the bias against conservatives or libertarians in the media and most of all, in academia. Ever the provocateur, he began to challenge campus speech codes - both legally and with his angry rhetoric - which have been used at times to silence debate and enforce a political orthodoxy on the campuses. This is where David Horowitz stands today, as the bete noir of the campus radical that he once was. "Fortunate Son" is a well-written memoir that spares no one, least of all the author himself. It is a lacerating, brutally frank autobiography that vividly coveys how we got from here to there and to paraphrase a song we all recall, "what a long strange trip it's been."
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Summary: The Truth About Communism in America
Review: David Horowitz is not only a former radical, Marxist activist, but a key communist operative during the sixties and seventies. His conversion from Left to Right ranks with that of Whittaker Chambers.
Horowitz is a courageous man, and those still on the Left today pretend (in typical Leftist fashion) that he does not exist. And when Horowitz appears they go insane because Horowitz was one of them. Horowitz is, to the mentally arrested Left, THE HERETIC.
This is a man who truly learned and now has actually become more helpful to not only the conservative cause but the American cause.
You must read this if you want to know a vital element of America's battle with communism. Today's elite media will still not admit to the public the intensity and scope of communist infiltration during the cold war. That is why they hate David Horowitz. He is also a testament to the everlasting possibility for the redemption of souls, and the truth about human nature.
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Summary: Truely hilarious
Review: What is more unbelievable, that Horowitz wrote this atrocity or that so many winners right such self righteous "I told you so" reviews for this piece of crap. Horowitz attacks anyone who doesn't agree with him as a communist and a Stalinist etc... We are not treated to any sources where we could check out Dave's "facts", Gore Vidal published a anti-jewish article in the Nation says Davey, when was that Dave, can we check for ourselves or should we take your ranting's as fact? That Dave has tapped the vein of neo-McCarthyites is obvious by the reviews he gets here, anyone who thinks that Dave has any truth other than "I was an idiot and associated with idiots" is brain damaged. Dave turned from ranting left wing stooge to right wing stooge, the right probably pays better.
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