Commit It would be Howard Fasts ninety-ninth birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Howard_Fast.jpg I find it extraordinary now that our local public library had copies of Conceived in Liberty, The Last Frontier, The Unvanquished, The Proud and the Free, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, Silas Timberman, The Story of Lola Gregg and The Winston Affair. We already had The American at home - one of the first grown-up novels I read - and soon I bought Citizen Tom Paine, My Glorious Brothers, Spartacus, Moses Prince of Egypt and April Morning. I gulped them all down. In retrospect, as I say, it seems extraordinary - a fourteen-year-old in a smallish provincial Midlands town able to get hold of a series of books - many at no cost, most of the others in cheap paperbacks - written by the son of a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant called Fastovsky and celebrating the radical/revolutionary traditions of American and world history. It was in his books that I first heard of John Peter Altgeld, first read Tom Paines The Crisis, first came across the injustices perpetrated on Native Americans, first learned about the American traditions of Anarchism, first understood the impact of McCarthyism. Later I bought and read The Naked God, Fasts account of why he left the Communist Party. That was a good read, too, and complemented The God That Failed. I didnt read his later block-busters and havent wanted to. But those early books were an extraordinary - to use the word for the third time - education for me, nothing to do with school, but treasured for what they taught me. spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAfast.htm
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 09:13:25 +0000
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