David Horowitz

As leading New Leftists in the Sixties, Peter Collier and David Horowitz were intimately involved in the radicalism of the day. Later on, they became the first of their generation to publicly reject the objectives of that revolutionary era and point out the cultural chaos it had left behind. Part memoir, part political analysis, part social history, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION is the compelling story of their intellectual journey into and out of the radical trenches. Telling stories of the New Left's most famous (and infamous) personalities and events, Collier and Horowitz reveal the destructive legacy of the Sixties and the way in which that decade continues to cast a long shadow over politics and culture today. When it was first published more than a decade ago, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION was a controversial bestseller that some critics compared to Whittaker Chambers' powerful political testament, WITNESS. This new edition contains new material which makes this classic work more relevant than ever in our own divided time.

This description is based on the MIT professor's writings on linguistics in the 1950s; but beginning with his criticism of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky became much better known for his radical politics than for his theories of language. Over the past forty years he has gained a devoted following in the United States and Europe for his increasingly bitter--some say hysterical--censure of U.S. "crimes." Chomsky has complained about being ignored by mainstream publications such as the "New York Times," but in fact his steady stream of polemical works, like the best-selling "9-11," have made him the center of a veritable cult. In "The Anti-Chomsky Reader," editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz have assembled a set of essays that analyze Chomsky's intellectual career and the evolution of his anti-Americanism. The essays in this provocative book focus on subjects such as Chomsky's bizarre involvement with Holocaust revisionism, his apologies for Khmer Rouge tyrant Pol Pot, and his claim that America's policies in Latin America in the 1980s were comparable to Nazism. Scholar Paul Bogdanor writes about Chomsky's hatred of Israel. Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz discuss his gloating reaction to the September 11 attack. Linguists Paul Postal and Robert Levine reevaluate Chomsky's linguistics and find the same qualities there that others see in his politics: "a deep contempt for the truth, descents into incoherence, and verbal abuse of those who disagree with him." "The Anti-Chomsky Reader" presents a fascinating composite portrait of a man who arguably is our most influential public intellectual.

The idea that taxpayers should pay reparations to African Americans for the damages of slavery and segregation is quickly becoming a central demand of some civil rights leaders. It has the backing of important black politicians like Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), distinguished black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates and activists like Randall Robinson, who led the successful boycott movement against South Africa a decade ago. The Chicago City Council has overwhelmingly endorsed the concept and municipalities and state governments around the country are considering giving it support. In this well researched and carefully argued book, David Horowitz traces the origins of the reparations movement. He examines the case made by its advocates and concludes that it is "morally questionable and racially incendiary." He notes that only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves; and most Americans living today (white and otherwise) are descended from post-Civil War immigrants who have no lineal connection to slavery at all. More intriguingly, he also points out that the GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African American community the tenth most prosperous "nation" in the world. But this book is more than just an in depth casebook on the hot button issue of reparations. In the hope of initiating a dialogue, Horowitz originally presented a summary of his ideas on this subject in the form of an advertisement that appeared in several college newspapers and was rejected by many more. Editorialists in America's leading papers and several chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union weighed on Horowitz's side. With the assistance of Richard Poe, Horowitz uses the response to the reparations issue to show how the new racial orthodoxy collides with the free speech battle and what its implications are for American education and culture.

Originally a radical socialist, the current driving force behind the rise of the Hollywood right recounts how he moved from one set of political convictions to another over the course of thirty years, and challenges readers to consider how they came by their own convictions.