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The Romance of American Communism

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The Romance of American Communism

By: Vivian Gornick
Narrated by: Randye Kaye
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Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life.

"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.

Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public.

©1977 Vivian Gornick (P)2020 Tantor Political Science Politics & Government Socialism Politics & Activism Politicians Biographies & Memoirs Russia Art & Literature Authors

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Lots of interviews on how lots of folks were romanticized and given a purpose to only have the shocking realization that Communism and at that Soviet Communism is only pretty on paper and leads to miserable conditions and ultimately death on the people it claims to help and uphold.
Thomas Sowell, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and countless others who have practiced and realized too later at times the disaster of Communism and Marxism.

Narrator is robotic but clear. As is the message on why Communism is attractive

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Great portrait of the far left in America, and why they abandoned communism for wokism

Where woke came from

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The reader sounded like a robot . The book was dry and did not flow well

Robot voice

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Most people have no idea of the history of genocide in the world, but it all leads back to communism starting in 1923 with the rise of Stalin and Mao the two worst genocidal killersthe world has ever seen. They have devastated the world for the last hundred years where hundreds of millions of people have died, fact.

Sadly, this book glorifies and glamorizes communism as some type of struggle that completely leaves out the history of the 20th century, and the Cold War. It makes it into a situation where people have no history of the devastation in Vietnam, Russia, Korea, and today, China, this book is a disingenuous approach, and Does not serve the reader in any full capacity of telling the complete history of communism, but instead glorifies it as a solution to all the world problems, and yet communism is the problem for the world since 1918.

Romance of genocide

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