"A striking novel from the acclaimed author of Radio Girls about two daring women who escape McCarthy-era Hollywood for London, where they find creative freedom and fight the injustices of the Red Scare. Nineteen-fifties America is bright and full of promise, and Phoebe Adler, a New Yorker brimming with talent and ambition, is forging her way as the rarest of things: a female television writer in Hollywood. But fears of a growing Red Menace cloud...

"USA, 1958. President Joseph McCarthy sits in the White House, elected on a wave of populist xenophobia and barely-concealed anti-Semitism. The country is in the firm grip of McCarthy's Hueys, a secret police force evolved from the House of Unamerican Activities Committee. Hollywood's sparkling vision of the American dream has been suppressed; its remaining talents forced to turn out endless anti-communist propaganda. LAPD detective Morris Baker--a...

"A cutting-edge look into a pivotal moment in U.S. history: McCarthy's infamous "witch hunt" for communists during the 1950's Red Scare. At the cusp of the Cold War, Americans were so afraid of communists living among them that they began to hunt them like witches. As Senator Joe McCarthy took up this mantle to hunt down "communists" in the U.S., citizens grew terrified of being accused, so they turned on each other--pointing fingers at neighbors,...

"The legacies of Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn seem like they might be with us forever. Yet Christopher Elias finds in them startling new connections between gender, sexuality, and national security in 20th-century US politics--a paradigm he christens "security state masculinity." Elias integrates biographies of the trio with a history of gossip magazines and their tactics--such as insinuation, guilt by association, hyperbole, and alarmism,...