Showing results by author "Howard Fast" in All Categories

“There is no human being on the face of this earth exempt from the Jewish influence. For as long as there has been history, the Jew has wandered through it, shaping it at times, riding the current silently at other times, but always leaving his mark. History without the Jew? It is inconceivable.”—Howard Fast. His popular history brings the history of the Jewish people into focus, from Genesis to contemporary times.

In The Establishment, Howard Fast pulls the listener into the turbulent and passionate lives of the Dan Lavette family story begun in The Immigrants and continued in Second Generation.

Spartacus, a fictionalization of a slave revolt in ancient Rome in 71 BC, is well known today because of the 1960 movie starring Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier. It was originally published in 1951 by Fast himself, after being turned down by every mainstream publisher of the day because of Fast's blacklisting for his Communist Party sympathies. The story of Spartacus, born a slave, trained as a gladiator, who led a slave revolt that was eventually put down by Crassus, was immensely popular and went on to sell millions of copies.

Among Howard Fast's historical fiction, Citizen Tom Paine - one of America's all-time best-sellers - occupies a special place, for it restored to a generation of readers the vision of Paine's revolutionary passion as the authentic roots of our national beginnings. Fast gives us "a vivid picture of Paine's mode of writing, idiosyncrasies, and character-generous, nobly unselfish, moody, often dirty, frequently drunken, a revolutionist by avocation" ( Library Journal).

On April 19, 1775, musket shots ring out over Lexington, Massachusetts. As the sun rises over the battlefield, fifteen-year-old Adam Cooper stands among the outmatched patriots, facing a line of British troops. Determined to defend his home and prove his worth to his disapproving father, Cooper is about to embark on the most significant day of his life. The Battle of Lexington and Concord will be the starting point of the American Revolution—and when Cooper becomes a man.

Howard Fast, author of The Immigrants, has proven himself to be one of this country's most popular authors. This second volume about the fortunes of Dan Lavette, the young Italian who lost his parents but launched a stormy and brilliant career as a result of the great San Francisco earthquake, encompasses an even more dramatic sweep of history from the depression years to the close of World War II.

My Glorious Brothers is the epic story of perhaps the most breathtaking chapter in the history of Israel, a stirring tale of courage for those who like to find meaning for today's world in the great events of history. After witnessing a ransacked and desecrated Jerusalem, Simon and his four brothers - soon to be known and revered as the Maccabees - rise to lead an earthshaking rebellion. Their tale has almost no parallel in human history.

After a life filled with danger, love and death, Barbara, now in her sixties, is living a simple life in San Francisco. And then, almost on a whim, she runs for Congress and sets in motion a series of adventures that brings her back to the excitement of the times, to a renewal of romantic love, to mortal danger as a reporter in Central America, to loss and tragedy, and in the end, to an exultant embracing of life.

This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.

It was everywhere. You couldn’t talk about the revolution without using the word freedom in the same breath. But Gideon Jackson knew that freedom meant something different if your skin was black. Fast’s fictional account of the post Civil War era takes us into the life of Gideon Jackson, a black man, newly freed, and determined to make a difference.

En esta afamada obra, calificada como la mejor novela histórica del siglo XX, editada por el mismo Howard Fast y distribuida desde su garaje debido a la censura política, se narra la historia del hombre que se convirtió en mito y terror para Roma. Espartaco fue un esclavo que, tras haber sido comprado para la famosa escuela de gladiadores de Léntulo Batiato, decide organizar su escape y el de sus compañeros, para terminar liderando una inusitada rebelión contra el ejército y la tiranía del Imperio romano en el 73 a. C.

This fourth-in-series story takes place during the turbulent 1960's as Barbara Lavette and her family are embroiled in the issues of that decade: Civil Rights, Israel's Six-Day War, the Nixon years, Vietnam, and riots in the street. Barbara Lavette develops into a powerful, strong willed, capable person.

In this unforgettable final chapter of the Immigrants series, Howard Fast follows the trials and joys of the wealthy Lavette matriarch, Barbara, whose life has been a selfless journey powered by an unshakable faith in the human spirit. Barbara now discovers the unexpected delights of finding love in her later years, even as she encounters the most daunting obstacle of her life.

The unforgettable novelistic recreation of the night before Christmas when General Washington and a rag-tag army slipped across the Delaware to surprise the Hessians and forge a nation.

Nearly forty years after the publication of his first story, "The Wrath of Purple," in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, Howard Fast returned to the genre with a set of nine supremely entertaining tales. In this collection, a Vietnam general shoots down what appears to be an angel, a man sells his soul to the devil for a copy of the next day's Wall Street Journal, and a group of alien beings bestow a mouse with human thought and emotion.

Big bugs, cloned cats, and feral star-children play leading roles in the seven stories that make up Fast’s unconventional and thought-provoking collection. The Edge of Tomorrow is a significant foray into science fiction by one of the 20th century’s most prolific novelists. In looking beyond our universe, Fast reveals much about the America of his time - where the Cold War and a nascent civil rights movement stoked unconscious fears and desires.

In Beverly Hills, murder has suddenly gone out of style. For five weeks, the head of the city's tiny homicide squad, Zen detective Masao Masuto, has worked only robbery investigations. But after more than a month without a corpse, this dry spell is about to end. The dead woman is Ana Fortez, a Chicana whose death was originally classified as terminal food poisoning brought on by a feast of botulism-infested clairs. But because botulism can only grow in an airtight space, the medical examiner warns Masuto that the fatal bacteria must have been purposefully injected into the pastry.

The inspiring story of Max Britsky, who grew up in the slums of New York and became one of the most powerful men in the American movie industry. Max tells the story of the rise of Max Britsky, entwined with the film industry’s beginnings near the turn of the twentieth century. When he was twelve, Max's father died, leaving him to scrape out a living in Manhattan's Lower East Side slums to provide for his mother and siblings. But Max was a natural entrepreneur, and he followed his business instincts and love of the theater to become one of the first film moguls in the history of American moviemaking.

Howard Fast began to formally practice Zen meditation after turning away from communism in 1956. The Art of Zen Meditation, originally published by the antiwar political collective Peace Press, in 1977, is the fruit of Fast’s study: a brief and instructive history of Zen Buddhism and its tenets, written with a simplicity that is emblematic of the philosophy itself. Fast’s study of Zen also inspired his popular Masao Masuto mystery series about a Zen Buddhist detective in Beverly Hills.

Howard Fast has placed the entire action of this highly charged novel in the space of one day at the substantial home of a prominent United States senator. This dinner party sounds like a well-ordered and gracious affair, but as events unfold, there are things to be settled - some are political and ethical, some are emotional, and some are questions of life and death. This is a profound and important novel with the dramatic intensity of first-class theater.