cover image American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone

American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone

D. D. Guttenplan, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30 (570pp) ISBN 978-0-374-18393-6

At his death, reporter and amateur classicist I.F. Stone was hailed as an “iconoclast of journalism,” “a dogged investigator and a concise and clever writer,” “an American institution” and “a journalist’s journalist.” At the same time, he was called wrongheaded and accused of being a KGB agent. In this sometimes workmanlike but often animated biography, Guttenplan (The Holocaust on Trial ) provides a lively portrait of a journalist who was as passionate about radical politics and getting a story right as he was about ballroom dancing. Drawing on interviews with Stone’s family and friends, the complete archive of Stone’s writings—including fragments of letters—and two previous biographies of Stone, Guttenplan traces his subject’s life and career from Stone’s early upbringing as Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia and his days as a college dropout to his birth as one of America’s premier journalists in the pages of the Nation , PM and eventually his own I.F. Stone’s Weekly . A brilliant gadfly and independent thinker, Stone was at once cozy with New Deal politicians and union leaders. He reported undercover from Palestine as he accompanied Holocaust survivors through a British blockade and became a hero of America’s Jews. Guttenplan’s lively biography brings back to life a man whose work has often been forgotten but whose writing and life provide a model for the kind of freethinking journalism missing in society today. (June)