Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

• Author: Hayward, Steven

With the swift collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of ideological communism, it might seem that the time has passed for the genre of ex-revolutionary, "God that failed" literature that includes Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, George Orwell's Animal Farm, and Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Radical Son may prove to be the last of the genre, and it is a sign of how rapidly the Cold War era is passing from memory that this book may not be well-received - and not simply because David Horowitz's blunt, aggressive personality prompts the unsheathing of the critical long knives. The intellectual and personal atmosphere of the Cold War era and the New Left is in danger of ending up as remote and inaccessible to our imagination as the Children's Crusades of the Middle Ages, and is perhaps already becoming so. Because of this circumstance, Horowitz's book may undeservedly face an uphill climb with many readers.

Even ideologically sympathetic readers may find Radical Son an odd book, because it is intensely personal. To a greater extent than any other ex-revolutionary narrative, Horowitz's book includes confession, introspection, and embarrassing detail. I'm not sure I really needed to know that he wasn't breast-fed as an infant, or about his extramarital affairs, or about his painful life-long estrangement from his father. Yet taken as a whole, Radical Son is a compelling story, because it goes farther than many of the previous narratives in conveying how deeply radicalism cuts into one's character and psychology. The supposedly redemptive power of radical ideology, Horowitz makes clear, reaches into every corner of the soul, thus making a break from radicalism a desperate and personally devastating matter.

Horowitz was a classic "red diaper baby," raised by communist parents in the hothouse atmosphere of New York City in the 1940s. His parents, he tells us, thought of themselves as secret agents and were in fact close to the chain of communications that delivered Stalin's orders to assassinate Trotsky. Horowitz even attended Wo-Chi-Ca (short for "Workers Children's Camp"), a communist summer camp for kids. He undertook his first political project at age 10.

Ever since 1917, leftist intellectuals of each generation have had to face a moment of truth, their "Kronstadt" (after the ruthless crushing of the Soviet navy rebellion in 1921), forcing them to acknowledge the "shock of recognition" about the true nature of revolutionary socialism, or...