John V. Fleming

My copy of Witness, a modern reprint, has three introductory essays by people who grew up regarding Joseph McCarthy as a hero. A common alternative take is that the Red Scare was a hoax, plain and simple, destroying the lives of countless innocent victims. Fleming, a Professor Emeritus of Literature whose wife is an Episcopalian priest, brings a scholarly perspective to four texts from this time which gets past these knee jerk responses. He has, of course, the benefit of the collapse of the show more Soviet Union and the emergence of a vast store of evidence confirming the revelations of these authors.
I made a point of tracking down each of the four texts under discussion and reading them before turning to Fleming’s analysis, which enabled me to see that each generated partisan reactions both “generic” and specific to the text, which Fleming analyses with great subtlety and a wealth of well-chosen examples. A very worthwhile book. show less

Fascinating information and engagingly written, but the organization was a little weak. It lacks a central conclusion—was it supposed to be that despite its seemingly rational underpinnings, the Enlightenment was subject to occult ideas? That's rather vague. It needs more definition.

Sorry, this should be a better book. Just short biographies of several Enlightenment-era occult-types. Little to no context, reasoning, etc. There remains to be a book on this topic that can provide those things.

Eloquent and witty.