Author: DAVID MARANISS A Good American Family is biographer David Maraniss’s look at a subject very close to his heart: His father. “This is an eye-opening book about an American family that was affected by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s,” said a review in goodreads.com. The author’s father was accused of being a communist. The book traces the effects of this on the Maraniss family and sets the larger context of the Red Scare, according to the review. The author “does a great job of bringing the impact on people and families labeled as ‘unamerican’ home to the reader,” the review added. In a review for The New York Times, critic Kevin Baker said: “For all of Maraniss’s research, a mystery remains at the heart of A Good American Family: Just what were his parents, and especially his father, doing in the Communist Party in the first place? This is a question Maraniss cannot answer, because his parents, for one reason or another — shame? embarrassment? an effort to spare their children? — rarely spoke of it.”