[USNBandit]

I read this book about a year ago. It is very informative, but so dry only the most motivated readers will be able to crank through it. It reads very much like a text book.

For those of us that were Cold War warriors, it justifies everything we were fighting for. It is amazing that while our nation was blessed at its birth with some of the greatest minds ever assembled, the nations taken over by communism were cursed with some of the most power hungry, psychotic freaks to ever walk the Earth.

[cornelis]

so dry only the most motivated readers will be able to crank through it.

But the introduction is well written and carefully written and accessible.

I didn't read the rest for lack of time. It's a record. This may appeal to people keeping records or those needing records. Solzhenitsyn's record in the Gulag Archipelago is similar in ways. I haven't read volume III and IV of that one either.

[monocle]

The lessons taught by this book will be lost and be difficult to convince others of the dangers of socialism by confining the conclusions to communism. The academics so fond of communism intentionally labelled Nazism to deflect the horrors of that government from communism. The real danger is any big government which makes a sizable fraction of its citizens totally dependent on the government so that government becomes the worst form of any monopoly with almost unlimited force to enforce its monopoly. Nomenclature of the different forms of government obscures the ultimate results.