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|a Jan Myrdal sat down at the age of 34 to tell the truth about himself. He ended up seven years later with a book of hard truths about the generation shaped by the war against Hitler; about the next generation, shaped by the Vietnam War; and about Western intellectuals and their claims to honesty and enlightenment. He writes without flinching about his difficult childhood years in the U.S. and Sweden, a young man facing love and betrayal, the hardships of a writer enduring poverty and censorship, and most of all the struggle to understand his times and place himself on an honest moral and political footing. He confronts these experiences and uses them, as he says, "to make the European intellectual as a type clearly visible." Jan Myrdal observes the Western intellectual from a unique vantage point as the son of Sweden's most celebrated intellectuals, Nobel Laureates Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, engineers of the Swedish welfare state and leaders of progressive democratic thought. These family ties give a chilling resonance to Jan's questioning of the Western tradition's claims to progress and reason. His personal journey ends dramatically as he confronts Western racism in Asia and the preventable suicide of a friend in Stockholm. The political and the personal become inseparable, and he ends with an indictment in which she spares no one, not even himself and his own attempts to break from lies and corruption.
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