SOURCE: "Introduction to Recent History," in The Commonweal, Vol. LXVIII, No. 18, August 1, 1958, pp. 452-53.

Harrington was an American educator and social commentator who was best known for The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) and The Politics at God's Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (1983). In the review below, he praises The American Communist Party for its balanced approach, accessibility, and historical perspective.

This new book on the American Communist Party fulfills a very real need: it provides an excellent introduction to a topic which has been central to many of the domestic political debates of the past decade. It is not as comprehensive and as scholarly as Theodore Draper's brilliant Roots of American Communism (that study, the first of two, ended in the twenties; The American Communist Party covers the entire period of 1919 to 1957), but rather complementary to it. The authors are more journalistic in...