Synopses & Reviews
Master journalist Murray Kempton re-creates an era when many believed that the only hope for America's future lay in violent revolution. Writing as both a radical and a skeptic, Kempton looks back--from the vantage of the very un-revolutionary 1950s--on the tangled affairs of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, and Paul Robeson, considering overly idealistic revolutionaries and others who were all too willing to switch sides. A historical investigation with contemporary resonance, "Part of Our Time makes it clear that meaningful and lasting resistance to power begins with distrust of one's best intentions.
Synopsis:
Through brilliant portraits of real persons who created the myths and realities of the 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton brings that turbulent decade to life. Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the "ruins and monuments of the Thirties" include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.
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