Thai Jones’s A Radical Line, Book Review Example

In A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience, author Thai Jones traces a personal history that meshes with the political activism in America since the 1930’s. The book presents an in-depth view into worlds very few are familiar with: the student uprisings and Communist parties of the Depression years, and then it follows the Jones family line into the extreme anti-war protests of the Vietnam era.

In the 1930’s, movements were springing up in corners of America as the country largely went jobless and hungry, and young students were horrified by the lack of government response to the needs of the people. They found they had one inspiration to turn to in the Soviet Union, which had come into power only a few years earlier, in 1922. Communism on this kind of scale was new and exciting, and many intelligent, dissatisfied young people embraced it.

One in particular was Thai Jones’s activist grandmother, Annie Stein. Jones relates the woman’s life in something like cinematic detail; the reader sees her moving through the streets of New York City, handing out pamphlets for the Communist party. Jones has her carefully leaving Communist literature around the small apartment she shares with her new husband, Arthur Stein, to get him interested in the cause. From accounts of these days of early student unrest and the struggle anti-government organizations faced to stay alive, Jones can, because of his unique family history, move his story into the political turmoil of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

If there is such a thing as “radical royalty”, Thai Jones is its prince. His father is Jeff Jones, famous leader in the Weatherman Underground, and his mother is Eleanor Stein, daughter of Arthur and Annie. In a suspenseful and lengthy prologue, Thai Jones recounts the day the FBI sent a SWAT team to the family’s Brooklyn apartment and finally arrested his fugitive parents. He says, to great effect, that this is his first childhood memory.

There are many books that relate the efforts of activists, both before and after the era of Vietnam. Several things set Jones’s book apart. The first is his obvious connection to it all; the stories he shares are not newspaper clippings, but family tales handed down personally.

Then, Thai Jones is careful to never defend or argue anything his family member’s have done. He presents them as the people he knew and who raised him, but he does not turn them into heroes. The book is almost non-political, because there are no apologies or explanations; Jones goes so far as to talk about the character of his parents and grandparents, as he gives the reader a good idea of their motivations in dangerously going against mainstream beliefs. He himself, however, keeps his opinions out of it. For the son of such controversial people, this is quite an accomplishment.

This goes to the other element that makes this book different. Thai Jones is a very good writer, and not simply a “celebrity” telling a story. In a clean and interesting narrative, he makes the reader see how young people could have turned their backs on their government, as he makes the idealism of embracing communism realistic and touching. Even as he describes his father and mother, he is not sentimental; when it comes to the bombings Jeff Jones and the Weathermen were responsible for, he only barely mentions how that radical group took care to make sure people would not be harmed. He even goes so far as to do this through another member’s statement of the time, and not as a defense of his family’s activities.

A Radical Line is a very well-written story, combining real recollection with episodes that rocked the country. Histories of the Students for a Democratic Society and many other radical organizations are touched upon, but all of it is presented as what it was: real activity from young people who, like his grandparents and his parents, were doing their best to make a difference. Whether they were wrong or right is left up to the reader.