Synopses & Reviews
Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was the most famous—and notorious—woman in the early twentieth century. This abridged version of her two-volume autobiography takes her from her birthplace in czarist Russia to the socialist enclaves of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolshevik experiment, and more. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.
- First time in Penguin Classics
- Condensed to half the length of Goldman's original work, this edition is accessible to those interested in the activist and her extraordinary era
Synopsis
"Well-being for all is not a dream." In this brilliantly enjoyable rallying-cry of a book, Kropotkin lays out the heart of his anarchist beliefsbeliefs that surged around the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and that have a renewed relevance and poignancy today. Humane and thoughtful, but also a devastating critique of how modern society is organized (with the brutal, narrow few clinging onto their wealth and privileges at the expense of the many), The Conquest of Bread is a book to be argued over, again and again.
About the Author
PETER KROPOTKIN (1842-1921) came from a major aristocratic Russian family but turned his back on it to embrace a life of imprisonment and exile in pursuit of his beliefs. His major works are
The Conquest of Bread and
Mutual Aid. His funeral was marked as the last permitted gathering of anarchists in the USSR.
DAVID PRIESTLAND (introducer) is the author of Red Flag and Merchant, Soldier, Sage. He teaches at St Edmund's Hall, University of Oxford.