There's more pure biography in this than I was really interested in. But it serves as a mostly-indispensable background for conveying Horowitz's insights about the left, gained over most of a lifetime mostly spent on the left. Born into a communist family, and coming to maturity as a leftist intellectual, it was--and I had never heard any part of this story--the murder of an acquaintance, Betty van Patter, by the Black Panthers that functioned as a wake-up call to him. Horowitz already smelled a rat on the left by the time of the brutal murder of van Patter, but he remained "in denial" as we now say, mostly stifling his doubts out of solidarity. Also fear. Fear of being killed by the Panthers--who seem to have killed a helluvalot of people--and fear of being unpersoned by the left--a tactic they're using to great effect currently. But the murder forced him to stop making excuses and face the facts--the left was unhinged and cultish--sound at all familiar?--and, as Bobby Seal later admitted, the Panthers were little more than extortionists, gangsters, and murderers.