Critical Analysis of the Other American

Introduction

Critically praised biography of a man who discovered poverty "and inspired a whole generation, now in paperback for scholars and anyone else interested in American politics, politics, poverty, and the history of the New Left. Most Americans first heard of Michael Harrington, with the publication of a friend of America, his seminal book on American poverty. Isserman's more "masterful tracks start Harrington at Catholic Worker movement and its rejection of his once deep-rooted Catholicism, his life in 1950's Greenwich Village, and evolution as a thinker. By the way, he dispels many myths, including Harrington himself somewhat encouraged. And he explains why Harrington, who more than any other man seemed ideally, positioned to play the role of an adult mentor of the New Left in 1960, but had not fallen out of favor with the young activists of the campus, and lost the opportunity of life to make his Democratic Socialist Perspective relevant force in American politics.

Discussion

During the last twenty years, Maurice Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, has devoted his research on the analysis of American radical expressions. With his first book on which side you were? American Communist Party during the Second World War (1982), through its analysis of If I Had A Hammer: The death of the old Left and the Birth of the New Left "(1987), he wrote a fresh and relevant studies of an important segment of American history often overlooked American and foreign scientists: The Story of the American left. After this line, Isserman presents us with a comprehensive historical account of one of the most important figures in the American left since the end of 1950-1980's: Michael Harrington.

In his journey through the life of Michael Harrington, Isserman offers an adequate balance between man and his times. He convincingly shows that Catholicism has had a profound influence on his life. He revives the experience of Harrington, as a college student of the Holy Cross, Yale University and the University of Chicago. It takes us to a life in New York, his work with the Movement of Catholic workers, his relationship with Max Shachtman, and its participation in various organizations of the American socialist movement, his opposition to the Vietnam War and its support for the civil rights movement, Eugene McCarthy, and Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. Isserman combines these personal stories with careful narrative of political and social context in which Harrington has become an important intellectual and political activist in the United States.

They exist in the most powerful and richest society the world has ever known. Their suffering has continued while the majority of the nation spoke of him as a wealthy and cares about the neuroses in the suburbs. Thus, tens of millions of human beings became invisible. They dropped out of sight and out of mind; they were without their own voice (Harrington, p. 184). Other America, written by Michael Harrington, a book that brought gave an opinion on the part ...