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Hotlists 2008
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Booklists
Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.
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Booklists and Suggested Reading
McCarthyism Stars
Page Modified: August 19, 2008
The Age of McCarthyism, Blacklists, Communists and Anti-Communists.
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
- Kill Me Again: Scott Elliott
Author: Faherty, Terence
Publisher: $ ISBN: 0684826887 Date: 1996
The Edgar-nominated mystery writer sets his new series in glamorous postwar Hollywood. Returning hero Scott Elliott reaches Tinseltown only to find there's no place for him in front of the cameras, and that out beyond the spotlight, beyond the glitz and glamour, there's nothing but jealousy, despair--and murder.
Updated 6.6.05 - Cheat and Charmer
Author: Frank, Elizabeth
Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400060915 Date: 2004
Kirkus LJ
Twenty-five years in the making, a first novel that has already been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Last Tycoon, Cheat and Charmer is certain to be one of the most admired literary debuts of the season. Written by Pulitzer Prize--winning biographer Elizabeth Frank, Cheat and Charmer is a masterful and richly detailed work of fiction-a Tolstoyan novel of marriage, sisterhood, art, politics, compromise, and betrayal set in Hollywood, New York, Paris, and London of the 1950s. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction
Updated 9.20.04 - Wavemaker 2
Author: Hughes, Mary-Beth
Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871138352 Date: 2002
Booklist
Library Journal
An exhilarating debut, Wavemaker II is a heart-stopping story of what happens when one man takes a fall for another, leaving his family in disarray. Combining poetic intensity with a gritty realism, Mary-Beth Hughes has delivered a masterpiece of page-turning suspense.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 1/29/02 - An Unfinished Season
Author: Just, Ward S.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 24 ISBN: 0618036695 Date: 2004
Kirkus PW Booklist
The distinguished chronicler of American social history and political culture hauntingly captures the 1950s, a time when even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within."
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 6.1.04 - Red Death
Author: Mosley, Walter
Publisher: Norton $ 19.95 ISBN: 0393029980 Date: 1991
Kirkus
Walter Mosley's debut novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, introduced readers to Easy Rawlins. Now an independent operative in Watts, Easy's caught in a crunch between a vengeful IRS agent in search of his cash and an obsessed FBI man in search of Reds (Communist sympathizers). The action is swift in this novel described by the Los Angeles Times as "Astonishing . . ".
Updated 6.6.05 - You Must Remember This
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Publisher: Dutton $ 19.95 ISBN: 0525245456 Date: 1987
An epic novel of an American family in the 1950s proves the tender division between what is permissible and what is taboo, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart.
Updated 6.6.05 - Blacklist: V.I. Warshawski
Author: Paretsky, Sara
Publisher: Putnam $ 24.95 ISBN: 0399150854 Date: 2003
Booklist LJ
Paretsky returns with her heroine V.I. Warshawski--"a private eye with the sharpest tongue and hardest head in Chicago" (The New York Times). This is a story of secrets and betrayals that stretch across four generations--secrets political, social, sexual, financial: all of them with the power to kill.
Suggested Reading: Private Investigators
Updated 9.08.03 - I Married a Communist
Author: Roth, Philip
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0395933463 Date: 1998
Booklist
Iron Rinn, born Ira Ringold, is an idealistic American Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, married to the nation's reigning radio actress. Fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and politically accurate, the story of Rinn's denunciation and disgrace during the time of McCarthy's "witch hunts" brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's betrayal, blacklisting, and naming names.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Shimmer
Author: Schulman, Sarah
Publisher: Bard List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0380976463 Date: 1998
LJ
A brilliantly rendered, wonderfully evocative novel of three ambitious people in post-World War II New York City, by the author of Rat Bohemia, Empathy, People in Trouble, and After Delores.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars -
The Golden Age
Author: Vidal, Gore
Publisher: Doubleday $ 27.50 ISBN: 0385500750 Date: 2000
Kirkus
The concluding volume in Gore Vidal's celebrated and bestselling series of American Chronicle novels -- a unique pageant of the American experience from just before our entry in World War II to the end of the Korean War. - from the Advance Reading Copy.
Suggested Reading: World Wars Stars
Updated 7/21/00 - The Red and the Blacklist
Author: Barzman, Norma
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth $ 24.95 ISBN: 1560254661 Date: 2003
PW
Norma Barzman book is a memoir of the struggle against McCarthyism in Hollywood in the 1940s and Paris in the 50s and 60s.
Updated 2.10.03 - Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties
Author: Belfrage, Sally
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 22.50 ISBN: 0060190000 Date: 1994
PW
A funny, affecting memoir of an atypical American girl--a daughter of radicals who desperately wants to blend in during the '50s, America's premier decade of conformity. Pinned to a West Point cadet, Sally's dreams of becoming a military wife were ultimately shattered, while her father was jailed and her mother deported.
Updated 6.6.05 - Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition: An Oral History
Author: Fariello, Griffin
Publisher: Norton $ 29.95 ISBN: 0393037320 Date: 1995
PW
For many years, the true story of the Red Scare that began in the '40s with Joe McCarthy and Hoover's G-Men has been lost in the dustbin of history. Now, Arthur Miller, Alger Hiss, Linus Pauling and nearly 70 others reveal the terrible price extracted by that era. Their stories capture firsthand the sorrow, the rage, and the heroism of America's darkest hour.
Updated 6.6.05 - Being Red
Author: Fast, Howard
Publisher: Houghton $ 22.95 ISBN: 0395551307 Date: 1990
Kirkus
Being Red is an intimate memoir of an extraordinary time--the years Howard Fast, one of our nation's most popular authors, spent in the American Communist Party, and under the constant surveillance of the FBI.
Updated 6.6.05 - The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism
Author: Johnson, Haynes
Publisher: Harcourt $ 26 ISBN: 0151010625 Date: 2005
PW
Compelling narrative history, insightful political commentary, and intimate personal remembrance combine to make The Age of Anxiety a vitally important look at Senator Joseph McCarthy and his 1950s anti-Communist crusade.
Suggested Reading: Terrorism
Updated 7.25.05 - Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagen Douglas - Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950
Author: Mitchell, Greg
Publisher: Random $ 25 ISBN: 0679416218 Date: 1998
LJ
Drawing on recently discovered unpublished documents from Nixon's 1950 campaign for the Senate, this rousing narrative--featuring such luminaries as Earl Warren, Cecil B. DeMille, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan--exposes the Red-baiting strategy used against Nixon's opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and shows what it was like to be a female politician long before the "Year of the Woman".
Updated 6.6.05 - I'd Hate Myself in the Morning: A Memoir
Author: Lardner, Ring
Publisher: Thunders Mouth $ 22.95 ISBN: 1560252960 Date: 2000
Booklist
This memoir of a reporter-turned-screenwriter follows Lardner's experiences through the Hollywood contract system of the 1940s and 1950s and its demise. It also tells how Lardner's membership with the Hollywood branch of the American Communist Party garnered him a federal-prison sentence and a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
Updated 6.6.05 - Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
Author: Schrecker, Ellen
Publisher: Little Brown $ 29.95 ISBN: 0316774707 Date: 1998
Kirkus
From an award-winning McCarthy scholar comes the first post-Cold War exploration of the anticommunist witch-hunt and its devastating impact. Tracing the way that a network of dedicated anticommunists created blacklists and destroyed organizations, this broadbased inquiry reveals the connections between McCarthyism's disparate elements in the belief that understanding its terrible mechanics can prevent a repetition.
Updated 6.6.05
Fiction
Nonfiction
Hotlists
African American Fiction | Christian Fiction
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Crime Fiction | Fiction | African American Fiction | Christian Fiction | Nonfiction Notables
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