SOURCE: “Party Time,” in New York, November 5, 1990, pp. 124-5.

In the following review of Being Red, Koenig provides an overview of Fast's life and literary career.

Novelist, playwright, biographer, detective-story writer—Howard Fast has been all these, but we know the author of more than 70 books best as a former Communist.

As the title of his autobiography indicates, he knows we do, too Being Red stops in 1957, several years after Fast ended a prison sentence for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and a few months after he left the party, when Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin. The story he has to tells is a lively and gripping one, and better written than Fast's preachy excursions into other people's histories, though there are lapses: “A writer is a strange creature. He is a delicate sheet of foil on which the world prints its...