Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left

Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to a May Day demonstration by his Communist parents. Radosh grew up in the parallel universe of American Communism, and when he entered the University of Wisconsin in the late 1950s, he became a founding father of the New Left and emerged as one of its leaders in the sixties.

But if Commies is an intimate social history of the American Left over the past half-century, it is also a compelling story of a crisis of radical faith. In the e...