Red Scare

by Clay Risen (Scribner)

Nonfiction

The Red Scare reshaped every institution in American life: Hollywood, labor unions, churches, universities, elementary schools—and, above all, the national-security state. Risen, a journalist at the New York Times, describes the biggest showdowns and the many oddities of the anti-Communist surge, in addition to the fear and suffering of those who bore the brunt of it. His book, a marvellous accounting that covers many moments of high drama, also usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets. It also describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end.

From The New Yorker