Communism
Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (Modern Library, 2003)
Summary: The best single-volume history of global communism ever written. Concise, readable, documented, and learned. Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Che, Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, and everybody else.
Key Quote: "Revolutionary movements and regimes tend, up to a point, to grow more radical and more ruthless. This happens because, after successive failures, their leaders, rather than reexamine their fundamental premises, since these provide the rationale for their existence, prefer to implement them more ruthlessly in the conviction that failure was due to insufficient resolve. Ultimately, when nothing suceeds, fatigue sets in and the heirs of the founding fathers settle down to enjoy life, but not before resorting to the most extreme forms of inhumanity." - p. 132
Bottom Line: Read this book if you want to learn a little bit about a whole lot of communism.
