Being Red by Howard Fast

Fast's is an extraordinarily non-ideological Communism, presented as a common-sense commitment to human dignity and anti-fascism. It's also very national, rooted in and concerned with the U.S. context, and often ignorant of the broader international Communist movement and, of course, Stalin's various crimes, at least through the mid-50s. What rumours filtered out were troubling, but for the most part whatever was going on in the USSR was low on Fast's list of concerns, until finally it wasn't.

Fast casts himself as a bright-eyed American boy in the Mark Twain tradition, a man of principle, action, and optimism, falling into success with a pretense of aww-shucks modesty that he only sporadically maintains, always the naive innocent (though also always "working the angles"), shocked when his sunny assumptions collapse again and again.

By far the best part: Fast horrifying Ilya Ehrenburg by offering him chewing gum after a full French meal at the Paris Peace Congress of 1949. (I read a good chunk of Ehrenburg's post-war memoirs last week, which were fascinating.)

Splinternet by Scott Malcomson

A short history of the internet. Born in the military-industrial-academic complex, briefly flourishing as a utopian boomer subculture, now increasingly nationalized and commercialized in an uneasy standoff with remnants of hacker autonomy and openness.