"Lynn does an admirable job of uncovering the details of Poyntz's childhood, chronicling her roots in a family committed to education and activism, her role as a student leader at Barnard College, her early involvement in the suffrage and socialist movements, her turn to unionism and antifascism, and her eventual rise to leadership in the CPUSA in the late 1920s. As Lynn shows, Poyntz's life mapped on to the tumultuous and splintered history of socialism, unionism, and communism in America."--H-Net Reviews

"Lynn's scholarship is exhaustive. Even though I am familiar with the case and the characters, I found myself being drawn into the writing and turning the pages eager to learn some new detail or twist."--Vernon L. Pedersen, president of the Historians of American Communism and author of The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919-57

"In the first full examination of this significant case in the annals of American communism and anti-communism, Lynn has constructed a tight story of one of the central precipitating narratives of the domestic Cold War that reads like a gripping spy thriller."--John Sbardellati, author of J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War