Reading the Best Biographies of All Time
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
by David M. Oshinsky
597 pages
Free Press (Macmillan)
Published: January 1983
“A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy” was published in 1983 and is widely considered to be the definitive biography of McCarthy. Oshinsky is a professor of history at NYU, a director at the NYU School of Medicine and the author of nearly two-dozen books including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning “Polio: An American Story.”
Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) is infamous as the most prominent face of America’s anti-communist “Red Scare” movement in the early 1950s. His actions were so conspicuous and controversial that the term “McCarthyism” was coined early in his rise to notoriety.
Oshinsky’s biography of McCarthy is almost exactly what sophisticated readers expect from a serious political biography: a sober, reflective, dispassionate and interesting exploration of the facts…
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