Monday, May 20, 2019

Six top books on the Red Scare

David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched Into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award.

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father is his twelfth book.

At The Week magazine Maraniss shared his six favorite books on the Red Scare, including:
Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild (2016).

Hochschild offers a vivid and heartbreaking history that evokes the idealism and violence of the Spanish Civil War through stories of American volunteers and journalists. This largely forgotten war is essential to understanding the ideological struggles that played out during World War II and the Red Scare. Read Hochschild's account in tandem with George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue