American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At his death, reporter and amateur classicist I.F. Stone was hailed as an iconoclast of journalism, a dogged investigator and a concise and clever writer, an American institution and a journalist's journalist. At the same time, he was called wrongheaded and accused of being a KGB agent. In this sometimes workmanlike but often animated biography, Guttenplan (The Holocaust on Trial) provides a lively portrait of a journalist who was as passionate about radical politics and getting a story right as he was about ballroom dancing. Drawing on interviews with Stone's family and friends, the complete archive of Stone's writings—including fragments of letters—and two previous biographies of Stone, Guttenplan traces his subject's life and career from Stone's early upbringing as Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia and his days as a college dropout to his birth as one of America's premier journalists in the pages of the Nation, PM and eventually his own I.F. Stone's Weekly. A brilliant gadfly and independent thinker, Stone was at once cozy with New Deal politicians and union leaders. He reported undercover from Palestine as he accompanied Holocaust survivors through a British blockade and became a hero of America's Jews. Guttenplan's lively biography brings back to life a man whose work has often been forgotten but whose writing and life provide a model for the kind of freethinking journalism missing in society today. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Kimmage I.F. Stone was among the most interesting of 20th-century American journalists. He had a voice as distinctive as H.L. Mencken's and an appetite for research comparable to Seymour M. Hersh's. The longevity of his career matched William F. Buckley Jr.'s, and eventually he obtained the institutional independence of an Andrew Sullivan. Stone began his life in journalism in the 1930s, working at the great urban newspapers; he had formidable access to the Roosevelt administration; and he was an American journalist present at the creation of the state of Israel. In the 1950s, he pioneered a new form of journalism, a self-published newsletter that merged political advocacy with investigative fact-finding. I.F. Stone's Weekly was an inspiration to the New Left and to left-leaning journalists in general. Stone can credibly be called America's first political blogger, though his blog was typed, printed, mimeographed and then mailed out to readers. D.D. Guttenplan, a London correspondent for the Nation, offers a vividly written, avidly researched biography in "American Radical." Stone was born Isadore Feinstein to Jewish parents, his father an immigrant from Russia, and he grew up in small-town Pennsylvania. Guttenplan lovingly recreates the world of early 20th-century journalism, as well as the cultural ambiance of the Popular Front, a wave of progressive enthusiasm in the mid-1930s that made a lasting impression on Stone. The Popular Front embraced FDR's New Deal and Stalin's Soviet Union; its anti-fascism and expansive radicalism were ideally suited to Stone's sensibility. The center of Guttenplan's book is the McCarthy period of the 1950s, when the Popular Front was under attack. Unlike most in his generation, Stone emerged from the 1950s a "radical who kept hold of his ideals." Guttenplan concludes by examining "The Trial of Socrates," published in 1988, Stone's book-length essay on ancient Athens. Stone had learned Greek after retiring as a journalist, immersing himself in classical scholarship to evaluate the timeless intricacies of political dissent. Throughout his biography, Guttenplan emphasizes Stone's salience as a political thinker, not just as a talented, spirited journalist. He portrays Stone as a progressive unencumbered by party line, capable of criticizing the left and courageous enough to resist conservative repression. Stone tracked the civil rights movement in the early 1950s, when it was not headline news, and he penetrated behind the official government story on Vietnam long before the anti-war movement was popular. When it came to the Soviet Union, Stone's radicalism did more to confuse than to clarify his political judgment. Stone was robustly pro-Soviet in the late 1930s; in 1937 he called the Soviet Union "the greatest social experiment of our time." Recent scholarship suggests some connection between Stone and Soviet intelligence, a connection he never discussed. Ultimately agnostic on the issue, Guttenplan hopes that there was no such tie. This question matters most to those with an emotional investment in Stone's radicalism. If Stone was a spy, he was not a significant one; but if he did work for the Soviets, the independence he claimed as his journalistic trademark would be a damaged commodity. Quick to attack injustice in America, Stone was slow to acknowledge the criminal nature of Soviet governance. Over time he came to see the Soviet Union as tyrannical and to identify with the anti-Soviet dissidents, but this was not the story he wished to tell as a journalist. Had he granted deeper meaning to the great famine in 1932 or to the Moscow trials and mass atrocities of the late 1930s, he would have complicated his relationship to the Popular Front. After World War II, he did not engage in self-criticism. Doing so might have given comfort to Sen. McCarthy and his supporters on the House Committee for Un-American Activities, and it might have bolstered the neo-imperial hubris of Cold War America. Stone's primary focus, in any case, was never Soviet Russia. It was the United States, from the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to that of Richard Nixon. As an observer of the United States, Stone produced much superb journalism, presented with literary flair and salted with humor. His public voice oscillated beautifully between heart-felt emotion and a Yiddish-inflected sarcasm. His achievement was the fashioning of this voice, in his writing and public speaking. Guttenplan argues for a larger achievement, for Stone's lasting importance as a political thinker. This is unconvincing. Stone was a socialist who revered FDR and Lyndon Johnson; he was a radical who critiqued the Washington establishment even while being part of it, "a radical celebrity," as Guttenplan calls him. A hero to the New Left, Stone lived a life of upper-middle-class discipline and decorum. None of this was hypocritical, though it was all intellectually contradictory. Stone's legacy was not a coherent set of radical ideas but an innovative practice of radical, self-published journalism, long before the Internet.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1St Edition edition (May 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374183937
• ISBN-13: 978-0374183936
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #113,050 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #11 in

  Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Political Doctrines > Radicalism

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Radical" Whose Life and Times Resonate Today, May 27, 2009

By	Lawrence Friedman (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I.F. Stone was an independent journalist now best known for the self-published "I.F. Stone's Weekly," which influenced a generation of crusading journalists. Stone presciently opposed the Vietnam War from the outset and otherwise set a standard for independence and analysis that his spiritual descendants, today's bloggers, can only emulate. Anyone interested in the great ideological, political, and cultural issues that engulfed 20th Century America and still affect us will want to read this fascinating biography. But if you come for the history what will keep you turning the pages is the portrait of a compelling and very human person (Stone smuggled himself into pre-independence Israel to see the first Arab-Israeli war first hand; in his old age, he taught himself ancient Greek and wrote a best seller about the trial of Socrates; after his death, he was unfairly targeted by the right wing as a Soviet agent). D.D. Guttenplan does a masterful job bringing to life the man and the times (just like the title says). Guttenplan has an impressive ability to describe Stone's world, whether in 1920s working-class Jewish Philadelphia or 1960s Washington and New York, and to summarize in a fair and perceptive way the many thorny political and ideological disputes that engulfed Stone, America, and the world. My standard for the merit of a book is how reluctant you are to put it down and how much food for thought it has given you. I loved meeting I.F. Stone, was sad to part company with him at the end, and was greatly enriched and inspired by Guttenplan's depiction of a life and times that continue to resonate today.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book, May 27, 2009

By	An Old Liberal (New York City) - See all my reviews

D.D. Guttenplan has got it completely right. I actually knew Izzy Stone a little bit. He was a force of nature and perhaps the 20th century's most important -- and certainly most independent -- political journalist. He was also a completely independent radical who had a life-time commitment to social justice but never compromised his own autonomy or allowed himself to parrot any kind of party line. Guttenplan's clear and intelligent narrative gives us a full picture of Stone's irrascible integrity as well as his utter brilliance as a writer and political analyst. It's also a great read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not to be forgotten, June 19, 2009

By	C. Glass "Charles Glass" (Paris) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Izzy Stone's Weekly provides the best chronicle of its time, far more reliable and critical of power than the Times of any American city. Anyone with doubts to this man's integrity and contribution to the art (rather than the mere practice) of journalism need only watch the great documentary of the early 1970s, I.F. Stone's Weekly, or read D. D. Guttenplan's biography. While, as Will Rogers famously said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, I. F. Stone treated that public as if it were the conscience of the republic that Thomas Jefferson believed it would be. While we may lament the degradation of democracy in the United States, it is worthwhile to read about a man who never doubted its importance or its potential. It is about time he had the fine biography he deserved.