Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
Only in America
By Russell Baker
Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
by Marguerite Young, edited and with an introduction by Charles Ruas
Knopf, 599 pp., $35.00
Eugene Debs is the radical of Marguerite Young's title, but the special pleasures of her book flow from its vast and bizarre cast of supporting characters. Debs has barely been introduced before we are whisked off to Europe to meet the German poet Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and assorted utopian mystics. At book's end, 580 pages later, we are in Russia with Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose death sentence has been commuted at the last possible moment.
Review, 4698 words
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