"A valuable and entertaining text on the destruction of the radical left in American politics" -- Russell Baker "He was free of the woeful predictability of ideologues of both the left and the right." -- Elizabeth Hardwick "In presenting his segments of history Kempton uses the technique of the novelist--and it comes off brilliantly. He succeeds in evoking the characters of the men and women he writes about, and he does what only the good novelist can do: he re-creates the atmosphere of the time in which they functioned and so forces the reader to inhabit a world which may be alien, dimly recalled, or long forgotten." -- The Nation "Kempton's book is exceedingly well written. It holds us in some places with a pathos of futility and in others with a drama of achievement.He does much to set in perspective an episode and a period that has been long distorted. The richness and pungency of his style make him easy to read." -- The New York Times One of our finest journalists, Kempton was always something of a cult writer, revered by his peers but lacking the profile of a Jimmy Breslin or Garry Wills.

A tabloid columnist who looked like a classics professor (he was rarely without his pipe), Kempton--first at the New York Post, then at Newsday--forged one of the most distinct, if not eccentric, styles in American journalism.His column always promised a strange, pleasurable experience: Pungent yet decorous, invariably teeming with rogues and scoundrels, corrupt pols and indicted capos, Kempton's pieces often read like a Damon Runyon sketch rewritten by a Victorian man of letters. -- Bookforum.