PositiveThe Progressive\"... an elegantly written portrait of the ever-evolving Eugene Debs ... Debs was released from prison with weakened health to lead a diminished socialist movement—neither he nor his party ever recovered, and when Debs died in 1926, the Socialist Party was a skeleton of its pre-war self. Yet in Gude’s telling, Debs’s spirit, like Bruce Springsteen’s \'Ghost of Tom Joad,\' has remained alive to counsel those who seek it. His spirit was alive in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, A. Philip Randolph’s civil rights advocacy, and Martin Luther King Jr’s public pressure campaign against the Vietnam War. Today, as a new generation of democratic socialists seek Debs, American Socialist is the book that will speak back to them.\
