Customer Reviews

Fireweed: A Political Autobiography

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Gerda Lerner, one of our most important historians, has written a magnificently honest and perceptive autobiography. She takes us through her youth in Vienna, her imprisonment by the Nazis, her escape to the United States where she married, raised children and built a new life, her years in Hollywood and New York, and her experiences as a radical during the McCarthy period. It is an engrossing, very human story that will touch and enlighten all who read it. We can only hope that Lerner will follow it with a volume that relates the story of her years as a historian who helped to create modern women's history.

An honest, courageous and illuminating account of a radical life. Also a reminder that our current troubles are not unique. Lerner's account of the persecution of members of the Communist Party USA during the 1950's, the abrogation of their civil rights and the threat to their livelihood should be a warning to us today.

This is an important and thought-provoking book that deserves far more attention than it has received.

The book's metaphoric title, "Fireweed," comes from 'Epilobium angustifolium,' a beautiful magenta-flowered plant that grows rapidly in disturbed and burned-over areas of soil.

Lerner is usually seen as a feminist writer, but this book has far broader significance. It should be read by all who are interested in world politics, Nazi and Communist ideology, and the triumph of the human spirit.

The first part of the book talks about Lerner's experiences as a middle-class Austrian who happens to be Jewish. Her memories go a long way towards explaining how the Nazi movement slowly engulfed not only Austria but most of Western Europe.

The second part, life in America during McCarthyism and the years of the Cold War, is both pro-American and troubling. Here Lerner begins to feel distress as she sees the universal patterns of human behavior.
She writes:

"Like all true believers, I believed as I did because I needed to believe: in a utopian vision for the future, in the possibility of human perfectibility, in idealism and heroism. And I still need that belief, even if the particular vision I had embraced has turned to ashes."

Lerner's writing is engaging and the book is hard to put down. Her real power lies in a clear-eyed view of human nature.

A particularly helpful feature of the book is that clusters of world news headlines and their dates are scattered throughout the text, providing a clear framework for Lerner's own memories.

This is an excellent book that should be required reading for anyone teaching World History ll, Western Civ, or Post-Civil War American History.

Kim Burdick
Stanton, Delaware