Showing results for "Socialism" in Biographies & Memoirs

A brilliant investigative narrative: How six average Soviet men rose to the pinnacle of Russia's battered economy. David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for

The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) - philosopher, historian, sociologist, economist, current affairs journalist, and editor - was one of the most influential and revolutionary thinkers of modern history, but he is rarely thought of as a Jewish thinker, and his Jewish background is either overlooked or misrepresented. Avineri puts Marx's Jewish background in its proper and balanced perspective, and traces Marx's intellectual development in light of the historical, intellectual, and political contexts in which he lived.

Guerrilla Warfare by the revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, written in 1960, has become a how-to manual for thousands of guerrilla fighters in various countries around the world. Guevara intended it to be a guidebook on guerrilla warfare, as inspiration for the revolutionary movement. Fascinating to admirers and adversaries alike, he captured the minds of millions with his leadership and his belief in guerrilla warfare as the only effective agent to achieve political change.

William Dudley Haywood, nicknamed “Big Bill,” was an American labor organizer as well as founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (commonly referred to as the “Wobblies”). He was also a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America.

An award-winning historian charts Hitler's radical transformation after World War I from a directionless loner into a powerful National Socialist leader In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler...

This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the 20th century's most ruthless dictators. In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him.

Six months ago, I had never heard the name Eugene Debs. Today, I believe he is one of the greatest orators in history, ranking alongside Napoleon, Robespierre, Lincoln, and Cicero. More importantly, he was a genuine hero, a man to believe in and follow into the fires of hell. His legacy has been unrightly ignored by the same powers that imprisoned and harassed him over his life. He should be an icon, but is unremembered, for reasons he himself goes into.

An inspiring survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China makes a passionate case that history is eerily repeating itself as the Woke Revolution spreads across America. Xi Van Fleet lived through the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a schoolgirl. Forced to the countryside with...

Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée de "la" biographie politique de Lénine, par le maître d’œuvre du Livre noir du communisme, best-seller mondial. Vladimir Ilitch Oulianov, plus connu sous le nom de Lénine, a été l’un des personnages clés du XXe siècle. Celui qui, avant 1917, n’était connu que des habitués du mouvement révolutionnaire russe est soudain apparu en pleine lumière. Il s’empara avec une formidable audace du pouvoir en Russie, y créa le premier régime communiste qui allait essaimer dans une vingtaine de pays jusqu’en 1989-1991, ainsi qu’une Internationale dirigeant plus de 90 partis dans le monde.

"Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project.

The following two audio clips are from Friedrich August von Hayek (May 8, 1899 - March 23, 1992), who was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and how prices communicate information. His seminal work, "The Road to Serfdom," has been republished many times over the eight decades since its original publication.

Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager - and thus a letter writer - for his entire adult life. The letters collected in I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 range from letters home during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, to the long letter to Fidel after the success of the Cuban revolution in early 1959 (from which the book's title comes).

Two decades after the publication of The Black Book of Communism, nearly everyone is or at least should be aware of the immense evil produced by that devilish ideology first hatched when Karl Marx penned his Communist Manifesto two centuries ago. Far too many people, however, separate Marx the man from the evils wrought by the oppressive ideology and theory that bears his name.

It is impossible to quantify the total number of deaths attributable to the policies of Stalin, but the ‘Excess Mortality’ (i.e., deaths over and above what would normally have been expected during the period in question) gives an approximate figure in excess of 40 million. However, this is only part of the story of the amount of misery inflicted by the Stalin regime through torture, deliberate starvation, neglect, separation from loved ones, cold and hypothermia (e.g. in the prisons of Siberia), which is unquantifiable and unimaginable.

Tens of millions of Americans sense there is something very wrong with the president of the United States, but they don’t know what. The Manchurian President answers that question. In writing this exhaustively researched book Aaron Klein, with Brenda J. Elliott, definitively exposes just how dangerous Barack Obama really is as America’s commander-in-chief.

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx - a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

This essay collection from renowned journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulic, which quickly became a modern (and feminist) classic, draws back the Iron Curtain for a glimpse at the lives of Eastern European women under Communist regimes. Provocative, often witty, and always intensely personal, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed cracks open a paradoxical world that through its rejection of capitalism and commoditization ends up fetishizing both.

Karl Marx, coauthor of the revolutionary text The Communist Manifesto, grew up in a Christian family, and his early writings showed belief in a Christian worldview. Yet in his adulthood, Marx embraced a deep personal rebellion against God and all Christian values. In Karl Marx and the Satanic Roots of Communism, Richard Wurmbrand explores the development of Marx’s antireligious perspective that led to the philosophical foundations of communism.

Much has been written about the anatomy of revolution from Edmund Burke to Crane Brinton Crane, Franz Fanon, and contemporary theorists of revolution found in the modern academy. Yet what is missing is a dissection of the revolutionary minds that destroyed the old for the creation of a more harmful new. Revolutionary Monsters presents a collective biography of five modern-day revolutionaries who came into power calling for the liberation of the people only to end up killing millions of people in the name of revolution.

Ronald Radosh's earliest memory is of being trundled off to a May Day demonstration by his Communist parents. Radosh grew up in the parallel universe of American Communism. When he entered the University of Wisconsin in the late 1950s, he became a founding father of the New Left and was on the center stage during the 60s.