A Good American Family, David Maraniss
A Good American Family, David Maraniss
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A Good American Family
The Red Scare and My Father

Author: David Maraniss

Narrator: David Maraniss

Unabridged: 13 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/14/2019


Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize–winning author and “one of our most talented biographers and historians” (The New York Times) David Maraniss delivers a “thoughtful, poignant, and historically valuable story of the Red Scare of the 1950s” (The Wall Street Journal) 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 20th-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. “Remarkably balanced, forthright, and unwavering in its search for the truth” (The New York Times), A Good American Family evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is “clear-eyed and empathetic” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.

About David Maraniss

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 1960Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nancy on April 13, 2019

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe In the years between my father's retirement and his recovery of grief over the early loss of my mother, he bought an electric typewriter and wrote his memoirs. Dad took his pages to t......more

Goodreads review by Bob on May 09, 2019

This is the author's tribute to his father, Elliott Maraniss, whose life and times were epic, from the Depression-era college society of leftist students (some of his companions went on to serve in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish civil war), to the U.S. Army in WWII -- where he commanded......more

Goodreads review by Jill on May 19, 2019

Author David Maraniss, a noted writer of biographies and other works of non-fiction, tells the story of his family when his father , Elliott, was called before the HUAC in the early 1950's. The reprucussions of being charged with being "un-American" lasted through out his father's life and is being......more

Goodreads review by Woodstock on September 11, 2024

The author traces the history of his parents and his mother's extended family through the second half of the 20th century. But there is much here which rang true to me - in the light of our 21st century politics. What is an American? What does it mean to label someone "UnAmerican?" Answering these qu......more

Goodreads review by Marti on July 12, 2022

The rulers of the United States have been invoking the Communist "bogeyman" for a long time now (they became synonymous with bomb-throwing anarchists of the 19th century). However, the amount hysteria conjured up in the general populace seemed to have been unusually high in the late 1940s/50s. The au......more