A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

✍ Scribed by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities.;Maraniss, David;Maraniss, Elliott

• Publisher: Simon Schuster
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1000 KB
• Edition: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition
• Category: Fiction
• City: United States,United States.
• ISBN: 1501178385

✦ Synopsis

In a riveting book with powerful resonance today, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication.

Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.

In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is an unsparing yet moving tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times. **

Review

"Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas." — Publishers Weekly , Starred Review

"An absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and '50s... A clear-eyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.” *— Kirkus *

“[A] beautifully realized account of an ordinary family in extraordinary circumstances and of how easily ‘normal’ life can be disrupted by a powerful megalomaniac with a dangerous political agenda.” *—Booklist *

About the Author

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s – Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book.

✦ Subjects

United States