The Golden Age Is in Us: Journeys and Encounters Paperback - 1996

From the rear cover

This is a history, a diary, a dossier of a radical's working life and circumstances among some of the most momentous years of the century. Its pages echo with the crash of rubble, of the old regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, of the illusions of the post-Cold War West, of physical landscapes in upheaval. Cockburn's own reflections, both personal and political, are interspersed with letters from Claud Cockburn, Graham Greene, friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, dippings into criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners, hate mail.

Media reviews

“A patch-work Paradise Lost.”—Times Literary Supplement

“A treasure chest.”—Alan Massie, Daily Telegraph

“A warrior freethinker, armed with courage and gifted prose to cut down on the hypocrisies of tyrants.”—New York Times Book Review

“Alexander Cockburn is the best radical-left journalist now writing in the U.S. with anything like a broad national and international audience.”—William Keach, Raritan Review

“He is a brilliant writer ... There are dozens of memorable passages far superior to H.L. Mencken in their power and their sense of humor.”—James Drew, Toledo Blade

“His account of conversations and meetings, ‘from the redwood forest to the gulfstream border,’ as we used to say, makes this book a vital narrative and would justify its price on their own ... This book will outlive the weird epoch it captures so tellingly.”—Christopher Hitchens, Financial Times

“In The Golden Age Is In Us Cockburn reveals an intimacy, warmth and tenderness,,, The book is, at the least, literate. It chronicles Cockburn’s view of everyday life. It reveals its doubts, affirmations, tyrannies, joys and sorrows and, more than that, reveals how his thought, in its amazing consistency, feeds into the culture and from it.”—Thom Jurek, Detroit Metro Times

“It's spontaneous, as though he exhaled prose. Perhaps it's simply that Cockburn is, after all, Irish. Anyway, it's a literary gem.”—George Scialabba, Village Voice

“Unusual and stimulating. An original mixture of diary entries over eight years. If it is a slightly surprising literary cocktail to find in the hands of so renowned a transatlantic Marxist, then the answer is that Alexander Cockburn has always been exceptional ... he possesses a genuinely enquiring mind combined with a real love of words.”—Anthony Howard, The Spectator