Right Turn
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.
Reviewed by Ramesh Ponnuru
David Horowitz is the most prominent member of his generation to have made the political trek from left to right. He has become, no doubt because of his radical background, one of the right’s most effective agitators, concentrating on issues that conservative activists generally neglect, like the politicized corruption of higher education and the federal “culture” bureaucracies. He has also, with his frequent collaborator and fellow ex-radical Peter Collier, challenged the left’s self-serving accounts of the 1960s and their legacy in Destructive Generation, Deconstructing the Left, and other works.
Now he has written a memoir integrating his political critique of the left with his own life story. That story is told with an honesty painful to himself and, sometimes, to the reader. It is a tribute to Horowitz’s moral seriousness that revelations about his troubled relationship with his father and disorderly romantic history are never presented as a therapeutic exercise, nor exploited for titillation; his missteps are neither excused nor minimized.
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