Better Dead Than Red!: A Nostalgic Look at the Golden Years of Russiaphobia, Red-Baiting, and Other Commie Madness

This look at anticommunist fervor in the U. S. offers commentary on movie posters, comic books, magazine articles and other artifacts that illustrate the near-hysteria that gripped the country at the height of the Cold War. Each item--a poster for the film The Red Menace , a 1944 Look magazine profile of Stalin (``A Guy Named Joe'')--is accompanied by Barson's ( Lost, Lonely, and Vicious ) brief, superficial interpretation. Most of the memorabilia is momentarily effective and amusing, as with the comic book ``Behind the Romantic Curtain,'' whose hero, stirring as if from a bad dream, sits up in bed and insists, ``I'm not going to let myself fall in love with a rotten Communist. I'm not! I swear it!'' But on the whole, the fragments presented never add up to prove any substantial point. In his introduction Barson states that ``selective amnesia'' seems to have settled over the collective ``American Memory.'' It appears to have touched him as well: although a two-page timetable of Russian history goes up to 1990, the book ends with the Vietnam War, and the joking two-word conclusion ``They lost'' does nothing to relate the events of the past with the present and future. (May)