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WITCH HUNT by Andrea Balis Kirkus Star

WITCH HUNT

The Cold War, Joe McCarthy, and the Red Scare

by Andrea Balis & Elizabeth Levy ; illustrated by Tim Foley

Pub Date: April 16th, 2024
ISBN: 9781250246813
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

A pointed account of a fear-mongering demagogue’s quick rise and meteoric fall.

As in this trio’s previous collaboration, Bringing Down a President: The Watergate Scandal (2019), this history is written as a playscript, with a cast of dozens of political figures, journalists and other witnesses, and victims and their descendants offering snippets of verbatim testimony with commentary by the omniscient narrator, “Fly on the Wall.” Setting them against a backdrop of events of the time, Balis and Levy clearly establish how contemptible the headline-seeking, accusation-flinging Joseph McCarthy (“A pimple on [the] path of progress,” as President Eisenhower once put it), and Roy Cohn, his bulldog lawyer, were. The piecemeal narratives also create clear pictures of the course of the Red Scare (and the contemporaneous anti-gay Lavender Scare) and the ugly efforts, led by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, to insinuate connections between communism and the nascent Civil Rights Movement. In the end, for all the whipped-up fear and grandstanding, as one of Hoover’s aides at last admitted, “We didn’t have enough evidence to show that there was a single communist in the State Department.” The storytelling approach serves as a reminder that history happens to real people in real time. “We want to emphasize,” the authors conclude, “that historical witch hunts affect regular people like the ones you know.” Final art not seen.

A scorcher that exposes shameful attitudes, personalities, and events that might seem eerily familiar.

(author’s note, timeline, note on sources, source notes, further reading, image credits, index) (Nonfiction. 11-15)