Within a riveting reserve with powerful resonance today, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Maraniss captures the pervasive dread and paranoia that gripped America through the Red Frighten of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming tale of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication.

Elliott Maraniss, David’s dad, a WWII veteran who also had commanded an all-black firm in the Pacific, was spied on from the FBI, named like a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American in regards to a Good American Family members: The Crimson Scare and My Father Actions Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in the us and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.

In a sweeping drama that moves in the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s tale through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they have a problem with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the politics dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring exactly what it means to end up being an American. It is an unsparing yet shifting tribute from a brilliant writer to his dad and the family members he secured in dangerous moments.