Shooting Star - Hardcover

Wicker, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 015101082X ISBN 13: 9780151010820

Publisher: Harcourt Brace International, 2006

Synopsis

Joe McCarthy first became visible to the world on February 9th, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address in West Virginia. That night he declared, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the Communist Party still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Anti-communism was already a cause embraced by the Republican Party, McCarthy tapped into this current and turned it into a flood. Little more than five years later, after countless hearings and stormy speeches and after incalculabel damage to ordinary Americans and the nation, McCarthy's Senate colleagues voted unanimously to censure him for his reckless accusations and fabrications. We know today that not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy's investigations into communists in the U.S. government.

About this title

Review:

"An insightful political history and a deft character study make this a wonderful introduction to a crucial American figure" - Publishers Weekly"

From the Back Cover:

PRAISE FOR SHOOTING STAR

"Tom Wicker's SHOOTING STAR is a marvelous account of Senator Joseph McCarthy's few but vile years of political witch-hunting prominence. Judicious and constantly absorbing, Wicker's account of the rise and fall of "McCarthyism" brings to life a tempestuous time when so many millions of Americans had their first encounter with political demagoguery. To read SHOOTING STAR is to feel the chill of what it is to have freedom of speech come under potentially fatal attack."--Charles Bracelen Flood, author of Grant and Sherman
PRAISE FOR JFK AND LBJ

"Incredibly persuasive . . . wonderfully astute and incomparably lucid."--Newsweek

"Part history, part biography, part inquest on dead hopes, the book is first-rate creative study of personalities and events and of how they have affected each other."--New Yorker

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace International
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 015101082X
• ISBN 13: 9780151010820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224