The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America's greatest curmudgeon, with a "flick of mischief on nearly every page."

    A memoir of New York Times foreign correspondent, partially reproducing articles therein published, about Salisbury's 1949 to 1954 sojourn in the Soviet Union, including the late-Stalinist and early post-Stalinist periods.

    Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the "ruins and monuments of the Thirties" include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.