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Title: Standing Fast

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Harvey Swados

Narrator: Noah Michael Levine

Format: Unabridged

Length: 26 hrs and 26 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-16-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

A masterful novel of political progressives making their way - and not - in an ever-changing postwar America

For Marty Dworkin and his band of young Trotskyist dreamers in Buffalo, New York, the vision of a just, socialist world crumbles with the rise of Stalin and the chaos of World War II. In the two decades that follow, Dworkin and his idealistic colleagues strive to establish a new political party and battle through unexpected trials with family, work, aging, and the changing world.

They run up against an increasingly conservative America and a thriving materialism directly opposed to their own fervent beliefs. They emerge humbled, but still hopeful, into the 1960s, when civil rights struggles and anti-war radicalism move to center stage.

Standing Fast is a classic, panoramic portrait of life amid the shattered dreams and visionary ambitions of the American left.

Members Reviews:

Great American Labor Movement Novel

Standing Fast tells the multi-generational story of the members of a labor union cell and their families and friends through the political events of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. While a lesser writer might have given us cardboard figures, Swados draws real characters-black, white, male, female, Jewish and Protestant-whose ideological affiliations and personality conflicts are complex and fascinating. As a white writer in the 1960s, Swados had an unusual understanding of the variety of African-American culture. His black characters (3 men) are as fully drawn as his white ones. Reading the book could be a joy for students of American history, as it describes political events that are largely forgotten today.

This is a terrific book to help understand the social history of America ...

This is a terrific book to help understand the social history of America during the 1940s and 1950s from the perspective of labor and the American Left. I've just recently discovered Swados and have also read his book of short stories, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn. The lesson I gleaned from these works: idealism is often trumped by rising material comfort; the post-war years of the 1950s had to have been a frustrating time for those dedicated to building a different kind of society. Radicals found it hard to make head way when people on the production line had money for cars, plenty of food, decent housing and an amount of discretionary income that had been unheard of in previous decades. Long live the Fifties!