★★★★★ 5
Powerful
Format: Hardcover
Spanning the 40s and 50s, this is an absolutely breathtaking, stunning story of the paranoia, cruelty, and hysteria around an imagined communist-planned takeover of the Unites States by infiltration. This lunacy and oppression occurred at every level of American society from the federal government down to local school boards. Thousands of lives were ruined, more people were killed or committed suicide than you can imagine. It's an ugly story about an ugly time, told like a thriller. I could not stop reading it. My one note is that it was not carefully edited. Every now and then there's a sentence that simply doesn't scan, doesn't make sense, or is awkward--but you could say that points to how good the narrative is overall. Exceptions stick out, and that's too bad, given the subject matter and given that the author thanks an entire large writers' group for helping him with his prose.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2025