Today is publication date of Stanley Kurtz’s new and very important  book, Radical-in-Chief:Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism,  published by Simon and Schuster’s Threshold Editions.  I have one thing I ask of my readers: Please rush to the bookstore, or go online and order it immediately.

What Kurtz has accomplished is what I thought beforehand to be impossible. He has put the dots together, revealing not only how Barack Obama has consciously dissembled about his past, especially in his own memoir Dreams From my Father, but how since his undergraduate years at Occidental College and Columbia University, he has advanced through life in the milieu and orbit of the far Left radical socialist movement.

Kurtz’s book is not another one of these “Obama is a Communist” screeds, many of which have been published in the past two years, and the names of which I will not mention here. These have been written without thought or research, and from news stories or headlines, and reflect only on the polemical skills of the particular authors.  Kurtz’s book is based on extensive research through scores of archives no one has thought of looking at.

I thoroughly concur, therefore, in the judgment of my PJM colleague Roger Kimball, who wrote about it last week. Let me add that as I read the book, I was continually jarred by the accuracy of what Kurtz writes about people whom I knew well, groups to which I belonged, and factional fights long forgotten in which I participated, and which all play a part in the path Barack Obama followed to the Presidency.

The path to a statist style government in America, what Kurtz calls “stealth socialism” because as he points out, the concept and the very words come from its adherents, explain much about the current administration and its domestic policies. To understand the present, we need to go back and look at the past.

So kudos to Stanley Kurtz, who has written what I believe is the most important political book of the year. I will be writing a comprehensive review that will appear in a future issue of National Review. But I want to give my readers a heads up. If the msm book reviewers do not ignore it, we can expect a cavalcade of nasty and dismissive reviews, all meant to destroy the book in the hopes that it will not be read.

So don’t let this happen. Trust me on this one. Watch Kurtz tonight on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News, and buy the book now.