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The Naked God
- The Writer and the Communist Party
- Narrated by: Christopher Kipiniak
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
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Editor reviews
Christopher Kipiniak’s stirring, passionate performance captures the raw, confessional quality of Howard Fast’s The Naked God, written one year after he left the Communist party in 1956 as an incendiary rebuke of Soviet-style communism, which Fast felt betrayed the fundamental ideals of Marxism, advocated anti-Semitism, and illustrated the corruptive qualities of the modern political institution. It’s fitting that "naked" is in the title, as one would be hard-pressed to find more painfully honest, unfiltered autobiographical manifesto on the corrosion of an artist’s political idealism.
Summary
Fast's book on his break with the Communist Party, and a riveting tribute to the importance of justice and beauty over dogma and rigidity
The Naked God is Howard Fast's public repudiation of the Communist Party, of which he was a devoted member for thirteen years until reading about the full scope of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The best-selling author of Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine, Howard Fast lent his writing talents and celebrity to the communist cause as a steadfast advocate and public figure. However, he felt increasingly ill at ease with the superior manner Party leaders took with rank-and-file members and with rumors of Soviet anti-Semitism. In his first book after officially leaving the Party in 1956, Howard Fast explores the reasons he joined and his long inner struggle with a political movement in which he never felt he truly belonged.