"Palmer has composed an elegant book that draws readers in with engaging chapter headings and does not disappoint, providing them with an immense amount of intriguing information about Cannon and the American revolutionary Left. Palmer's writing is engaging and hard to put down; you can feel his passion for his subject."-- H-SHGAPE "An exhaustive account of Cannon's life and his place in the various machinations of the revolutionary Left."-- Labor History "In this magnificent biography of Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, Bryan Palmer recovers the lost history of the Left in the 1920s and completely reframes the debate about the origins and nature of the CPUSA. Beyond Cold War calumny or Popular Front fairy- tale, here is the true story of 'Reds,' told by a master historian."--Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, Buda's Wagon, and other books "Destined to become a path-breaking classic on American Communism, Bryan Palmer's study of Jim Cannon offers a coherent and richly detailed account of that movement's formative decade. Communism in the United States of the 1920s emerges from this volume not as a mere hotbed of sterile sectarianism, but as a promising outgrowth of U.S.

radical traditions boldly intersecting with the contradictory realities of Russian Communism."--Paul Le Blanc, author of A Short History of the U.S. Working Class and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience.