Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties

by Peter Collier, David Horowitz (Editor)

More than 20 former radicals of the sixties come out of the political closet and look back at the dream that died.

271 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 1989

About the author

Founder of Encounter Books in California, Collier was publisher from 1998-2005. He co-founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture with David Horowitz. Collier wrote many books and articles with Horowitz. Collier worked on the website FrontpageMag. He was an organizer of Second Thoughts conferences for leftists who have moved right.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Ella Kanefsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a collection of essays from people of various perspectives the quality ranges (with some of the worst coming from the editors themselves.) I found reading this novel to be very annoying. The Human Rights movement was not as influential as it is today, so those who wished to sweep abuses under the rug to stop a government from being criticized, were able to do it for - sometimes - decades. With specific people in America saying it as a necessary evil. Military action was seen as one of the only options in certain cases, because humanitarian aid would not be made a priority otherwise. I personally am familiar with the different definitions for marxism/leninism as theories under communism compared to socialism. There are many governments in this publication which uses these terms interchangeably for their own ends. So at times it was confusing to try and determine in what way the means of production were supposedly controlled by the worker under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. But it became much easier to understand these events knowing that many simply lied about keeping promises, or otherwise implementing the systems that they pretended to.