Will I love Naming Names?

As the child of screenwriters, Naming Names felt personal to me.

It was probably the first serious attempt at a comprehensive account of the Hollywood Blacklist, the product of the Red Scare driven by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy that shattered careers and lives.

It examines not only the politics of the hunt for communists in the arts but the lives of the real people affected and the fear generated when colleagues and neighbors were pressured to turn on each other in their testimony.

It is particularly timely just now.

I was in New York waiting to interview Elia Kazan, a somewhat notorious figure in the history of the blacklist, when I first spotted a newly published book that sought to explore events from the perspective of those involved, both those who cooperated with the Committee and those who refused to do so. Drawing on oral histories and interviews, Navasky’s book focused on the motives and rationales of those (like Kazan) who ‘named names’ and those who pleaded the fifth amendment or took other routes to avoid becoming, in the author’s nuanced but ultimately uncompromising judgment, an informer. This book… show more.