Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times from Left to Right - Hardcover

It is hard to think of anyone who has turned on his own past with more fury than David Horowitz. Radical Son, his memoir, charts a trek from one political commitment to something approaching its opposite, and the events that propelled him on his way.

How, ultimately, is David Horowitz's transformation to be explained? After all, many 1960's radicals dwelled in the same tawdry cesspool, witnessed the same murders or lesser acts of crime and duplicity, yet continued to cling fervently to the cause.

One explanation may be generational. Horowitz was approaching the seasoned age of thirty when he entered California radicalism in the late 1960's, and was thus slightly older than his fellows. His deviation, then, may be seen as that of a man who had come to place some value on middle-class existence.

A second possibility, one that runs somewhat counter to the first, is that the very depth and intensity of Horowitz's radicalism led inevitably to a spasm of self-correction. The writer Paul Berman once remarked with some asperity that "Horowitz is in the American vein. He doesn't correct; he converts."

A third interpretation might also be adduced. As the gripping pages of Radical Son make clear, Horowitz possesses a fearless capacity for self-examination--hardly a noted virtue of the radical Left. In the end, it is this capacity which may have rescued him from an association with murderers. It certainly enabled him to reinvent himself, and to forge a new career as the kind of person his parents had no doubt warned him against. -- Commentary Magazine, June 1997, Christopher Caldwell

[H]is portrait of the 60s and its legacy is sure to make his book controversial.... With Radical Son, Mr. Horowitz has written a courageous book, full of self-revelation with a willingness to expose his own frailties in the most sensitive areas of sex and family. Still he is nothing if not contentious, and some of his contentions will rub readers the wrong way. -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard Gid Powers