We meet Huey Newton, a street hustler and murderer who founded a black militia that became the Sixties’ most resonant symbol of black power and black militance.
Horowitz’s encounter with Newton and his Black Panthers, the most celebrated radical group of the Sixties, becomes the focal point of the story when a brutal murder committed by the Panthers changes his life forever, prompting the profound “second thoughts” that eventually led him to become an intellectual leader of conservatism and its most prominent activist in Hollywood.
Horowitz’s memoir —often painful, occasionally maddening, always riveting—is a spiritual autobiography about the costs and consequences of bad commitments. The implications of his political choices haunt Horowitz on every page, from the breakup of his two marriages to his estrangement from his Communist father; from shattered friendships with former comrades to reconciliation with his grown children. This painful and difficult journey from Left to Right has made Horowitz the most hated ex-radical of his generation. In telling his story he provides not just an intimate personal account of his own transformation, but a scathing moral history of the American left, and a guide to the evolving political conscience of a whole generation of.