Synopses & Reviews
Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian." As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century's cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Winner of the Ingersoll Prize; winner of the Richard M. Weaver Prize; a Notable Book. "Provides many glowing embers of reasoned and wise argument."--Richard Bernstein, "A book that ought to be required reading for everyone about to enter college, and by every member of Congress."--Frank Wilson,
Review
"This collection of essays by the renowned Stalinist historian, author of the classics, The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow, argues that evil ideas were responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths in this century. Having noted that 30 million people were killed by wars and 170 million by totalitarian regimes, Conquest writes, 'ideas that claimed to transcend all problems, but were defective or delusive, devastated minds and movements and whole countries, and looked like plausible contenders for world supremacy.' He sees the Communists as no better than the Nazis, citing such evidence as a remark by Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalin's poet laureate, about the kulaks, who were eradicated because they resisted collective ownership: 'Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.' Eloquently mixing history and literature and philosophy, Conquest, 82, is one of the last of a dying breed of literary historians; this book is among his finest." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
"Illuminates the past with a mighty searchlight and clears away mountains of nonsense."--Gabriel Schoenfeld,
About the Author
Robert Conquest (1917--2015), author of Reflections on a Ravaged Century and The Great Terror, was a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.