Red Scare - by Clay Risen (Paperback)

About the Book

"Red Scare tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare--based in part on newly declassified sources--by an award-winning writer of history and New York Times reporter"--

Book Synopsis

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews

From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both "lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible...[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end" (The New Yorker)--based in part on newly declassified sources.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with "scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses" (The New York Times Book Review), journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, courage, and delirium of those years. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and toward a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the Left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

"Thorough, impassioned...detailed, [and] tension-packed" (Los Angeles Times), Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment.

Review Quotes

"A sweeping history of the campaign to suppress liberal dissent via blacklisting and harassment...An exemplary work of political and cultural history that invites a gimlet-eyed look at our own time." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Risen's feverish prose perfectly captures the chaos of McCarthyism, from the book bans to the power grabs to the lives forever altered in the scuffle...In examining this turbulent era from the vantage of our own charged moment, Risen goes beyond the spectacle to arrive at the gritty center. Frightening yet thoroughly affecting, Red Scare is propulsive history at its most striking." -Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. A member of the Society of American Historians, he is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.