The Education of a Reluctant Radical: Book 5

“This book spans a period of forty years, from my entering jail in March of 1949 to November of 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. It touches nine presidencies—all dominated by the Cold War. That long period contained some of the most traumatic events in the history of the United States: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, as well as the wars in Korea and Vietnam.”

Reconstruction, Book 5 is the final volume of memoirs from one who was, according to Italo Calvino, “a unique man… truly in love with the United States.” Here is a remarkable first-hand account of many formative events of our time, and contains portraits of some of its great figures, including encounters with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. It also recounts the reconstruction of Carl Marzani’s life following imprisonment and divorce, with the building of a new life and family.

This volume also includes Carl Marzani’s Prison Notebooks — confiscated by the prison authorities in 1949 and retrieved from the FBI files in the 1980s — which now take their place among the literature of incarceration.

Carl Marzani was imprisoned in 1950 as one of the first victims of the gathering cloud of McCarthyism, his case a cause celebre. He would subsequently become one of New York’s foremost left publishers and, as a writer and polemicist, a distinctive voice of the Cold War years. Right up until his death in 1994, he retained the sense of anger at injustice that burned throughout his intellectual and working life. A passionate belief in the value of democracy informs every page of this book.