Thorough, impassioned but even-handed ... For 480 detailed, tension-packed pages, Risen lays out that line without stepping over it, allowing the past to become prologue ... A tapestry of individual dramas and miniature paranoid thrillers
The Red Scare can be hard to understand—and hard to narrate—because it was so many things at once ... Risen’s book usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets.
Meaty and powerfully relevant ... Risen tells his story with a punch and an economy that are at times almost Hemingwayesque ... Some of Risen’s scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses in the poorly air-conditioned committee room ... Still, Risen’s book is largely a synthesis of existing sources, and it lacks the immediacy of works like Naming Names.
