Not Well Reds
The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War
by John V. Fleming
W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2009
(362 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Richard M. Reinsch II
In his highly engrossing book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War, John V. Fleming, professor emeritus of literature at Princeton, recovers four texts—Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) , Richard Krebs’s Out of the Night (1941), Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (1946), and Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952)—that unmasked the existential truth that Communism offered to its believers. In many respects, Fleming’s task is immensely complicated. Most contemporary observers struggle either to recall or to imagine the paramount threat once posed to American security by the armed doctrine of Soviet Communism. Equally distant are the compelling moral and spiritual attractions that this ideology offered to men and women of learning and sensitivity who occupied formidable intellectual and political posts.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door with Full Online Access
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
- Six print issues per year
- Full digital archive access
Subscribe (Print + Online)
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only)
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on communism from the online archives
28.5—Sept/Oct 2015
Remembering Angka & the Idolatry of the Khmer Rouge 40 Years Later by Les Sillars
19.10—December 2006
Workers of Another World United
A Personal Commemoration of Poland’s Solidarity 25 Years Later by John Harmon McElroy
more from the online archives
32.5—September/October 2019
on the Inhuman Transformation of Transgenderism by Anthony Esolen
31.2—March/April 2018
The Transmission of Christianity Is Not a New Task by Nathanael Devlin
17.6—July/August 2004
Old Science Confronts a Formidable Challenge in the Scientific ID Movement by Jay W. Richards
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
