Furst’s richly researched and detailed book gives us a vivid portrait of the Lower East Side in the ’60s and ’70s from the perspective of a radical milieu, but also from a child’s-eye, street-level view ... Freedom from a corrupt social order, as the characters achieve it, means excision from the economic webs that underpin not just material but social life. Is this a courageous or a foolhardy—even selfish—course? Revolutionaries examines the question from every angle, orbiting the evidence and arguments in a case it refuses to judge ... The novel’s ultimate beauty—like its characters’—is spiritual. It refuses to sanctify or condemn anyone ... In a deeply felt and often beautiful book, Furst has done his part to continue this song [of countercultural ideals].

Seeking to demythologize an era, Furst upends our often nostalgic, peace-and-love view of the Sixties. He's particularly adept at painting a visceral picture of Freedom's surroundings, using the observational gifts of a child; glimpses of real-life activist figures such as William Kunstler and Phil Ochs add to the verisimilitude. Recommended.

Never seen from the inside out, Lenny remains the sum of his loud and repetitious behaviors, and, as with Hoffman himself, a little of him goes a long way. Revolutionaries is best when Lenny is out of sight—locked up or on the run ... Phil Ochs, appearing without an alias, is the book’s most poignant figure—and, in fact, a far richer subject for a novel than Abbie Hoffman. The reader initially cringes as this gentle folksinger, spiralling through delusions of persecution, becomes a fat and drunk maunderer. But Furst’s portrait of him ends up being rounded and tender ... Revolutionaries also has to fight its way out of the long shadow cast by The Book of Daniel (1971), E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the surviving son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, a couple closely modelled on the Rosenbergs ... Revolutionaries is a much more modest production. It is, to be sure, over-exampled and overdetermined, but it knows how to get out of its own way—how, intermittently, to turn down the political and historical volume to let a reader see instead of just hear.

Fred recollect[s] the events of his childhood with no real indication of what has happened in the decades since. It’s unclear whether such a strategy is meant to engage us as collaborators, completing the gaps in the story — which represents a blurring of a different sort. The more we see Hoffman in Lenny, or Rubin in the character of Sy Neuman, the more we read with a double vision, layering the actual person over the fictional one. Whatever the intention, the effect is to leave us in an uncertain middle territory in which neither the history nor the fiction is sufficiently enlarged. The same is true of the book’s close focus, the way Fred barely comments on his story, even as it is clear that he is telling it from the perspective of a present moment in which he seems to want nothing so much as to set aside his past ... All this raises a set of necessary questions: Why is Fred telling us about it now? Even more: Where is he as he unburdens himself? Also: Who is asking him to discuss his father’s life? On a certain level, these inquiries sit at the center of any first-person fictional narration; believing the voice is the first in a series of necessary suspensions of disbelief. At the same time, the fact that we never get the answers reduces the scope, the perspective, of the novel, making it feel a little bit claustrophobic, a little bit small ... Without that broader sense of context, of Fred’s motivation, what it means to him, Revolutionaries never quite transcends itself.

...what raises this book far above being a roman à clef are the vivid scenes of Fred trying to have a normal childhood in gray, grimy Nixon-era New York City and of him and his mother finding solace with each other as they watch Lenny drift away from them, literally and figuratively. A haunting vision of post-'60s malaise whose narrator somehow retains his humor, compassion, and even optimism in the wake of the most crushing disillusionment.

Furst’s richly researched and detailed book gives us a vivid portrait of the Lower East Side in the ’60s and ’70s from the perspective of a radical milieu, but also from a child’s-eye, street-level view ... Freedom from a corrupt social order, as the characters achieve it, means excision from the economic webs that underpin not just material but social life. Is this a courageous or a foolhardy—even selfish—course? Revolutionaries examines the question from every angle, orbiting the evidence and arguments in a case it refuses to judge ... The novel’s ultimate beauty—like its characters’—is spiritual. It refuses to sanctify or condemn anyone ... In a deeply felt and often beautiful book, Furst has done his part to continue this song [of countercultural ideals].

This roman à clef from Furst...is a heartfelt meditation on how quickly history outruns political and social ideals ... Furst modulates movingly between Freddy’s childhood memories of the father whom he admired and his adult perspective on how cruel and selfishly opportunistic Lenny could be. Furst’s novel and its themes will resonate with readers regardless of whether they lived through its times.