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5.0 out of 5 stars
Wilson was not a political crackpot after all, December 3, 2007
I read this book in 1974 for one of my last college undergraduate examinations: I was stunned. Wilson's story is that, after living in Europe for almost ten years, he returned to the United States in the late 50's, filed his taxes, and wound up in a heap of unanticipated trouble. His iconoclastic analysis of the relationship between the Cold War, the 1948 changes to U.S. income tax laws, and the consequent creeping abridgment of American civil liberties shattered my callow idealism. In spite of the publicity attending the political turmoil of the 60's and early 70's, before I read Wilson's book, I didn't realize the individual freedoms that had already been lost in America to the military-industrial complex even before the civil rights movement and subsequent counterculture revolt began to receive significant media attention. There has been so much more violence done to individual constitutional rights since 9/11 that Edmund Wilson's cri de coeur (and wallet!) might sound quaint, or even naive, today; but as a reference point for the post-WWII impact of the expansion of the powers of the federal government (on behalf of corporate America) over its ever more hapless citizenry, I have to believe that this book is, at the least, an invaluable historical resource from a terrific writer. I'm flabbergasted that it is currently out of print.
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