From a Heroic Past

Carlo Tresca’s life was exciting and romantic, the stuff of legends. The anarcho-syndicalist Italian-born labor agitator, journalist, and fierce foe of capitalism, Stalinism, and fascism was a stormy figure on the American left. He was so flamboyant in the American labor movement during the first four decades of this century that it would seem impossible to write a mediocre biography of him. Yet I feel that, even though the book has been praised by many reviewers, Alfred Kazin among the...