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Summary: Catalogs and illustrates the horror of communism
Review: These historians have not only cataloged the programs of all the 20th century's communist governments and tallied the toll in human suffering and death, they illustrate it again and again with the testimony of both sufferers and tormentors. One illustration paints a vivid picture of young children cowering together in a small hut far away from home slowly starving. Traumatized from the fear generated being rounded up and forcibly relocated, separated from their father and sheperded by a slowly starving mother that daily ventures out in search of non-existant food. Then one can compare this to Soviet documents outlining a pre-planned program that was designed to terrorize and slaughter these people and millions more. The authors outline the patterns of organized violence and terror displayed in each and every communist government. A sad, haunting book that I think should be widely read lest we forget and repeat the mistake of listening to Utopian dreamers that start by dehumanizing any segment of our world.
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Summary: Outstanding
Review: It tells the sad history of Communism. However, I expected something of a right wing diatribe against Communism. I was impressed that there was no omission for the driving forces behind Communism. The book acurately points to poverty in places like rural Cuba, Peru, and Nicaragua. It also points to the corruption and heartless indifference of preceding regimes. It's critical of Somoza, et al. Hence, it is clearly a book with an opposition to naked oppression.Like another commentator, I would have liked to hear about some of the movements where Communism failed to come to power; Brazil for example. Nevertheless, it is an excellent read, and long overdue.
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Summary: Ironic Revisionism
Review: Ms. Courtois attempts to provide a history of communist regimes and movements throughout the century. She provides a wealth of detail, but this is overwhelmed by an obvious lack of objectivity and real insight. Thus many of the "parade of horrors" she cites did in fact happen, but her interpretations are biased and flawed, leading to a narrative full of reversals in causality and the omission of other group factors necessary for a complete analysis. To begin with, there is here a neglect of the particularist group origin of the underlying ideology of Marx, LaSalle, Bernstein, etc., which group is painstakingly identified in Wilson's "To the Finland Station." Lacking this understanding, the book places responsibility for murders and other atrocities on communism, rather than the group fear of capitalist encirclement, soon supplemented by group hysteria about Italian and German nationalist movements. Courtois also neglects the group origin of the original key Soviet bolsheviks-Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, as well as the heads of the German and Hungarian comrades, Rosa Luxemborg and Bela Kun. Thus, she interprets as aggression what was actually the permanent international revolution inherent in the group's thought system-forced world conversion to a new religion, and the end of the nation state. Similarly the condemnation of Stalinism here omits an understanding of the participation of such group luminaries as Kaganovich, Yagoda, Paukus (sp.?), Litvinov, Maisky, Orlov, Deutsch, Krivitsky, Reiss, Koestler and possibly Beria, as well as the wives of many of Stalin's inner circle, each loyal to The Cause, until their own liquidation either happened or loomed. And in the West, of course, we found a similar group attraction of communism, from writers such as Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer, to scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer, to confirmed workers for the party and its organs, such as Lovestone, the Rosenbergs, George Blake, the Cohens/Krogers, Greenglass and Ted Hall. Surely this group of adherents offerred something particularistic to communism, and it to them, a topic neglected in this book. Such enduring and unwavering group belief and loyalty must be adaptive in the sociobiological sense, a topic explored commendably in MacDonald's "Culture of Critique." The final irony is of course the criticism by the editor of a positive review, evidence that the group-ideological phenomenon of "factionalism" remains with us.
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Summary: Facts of the Case
Review: Rapidly becoming an indispensable source of information about the legacy of Communism in the twentieth century, after its controversial appearance in France, and in the tradition of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror. After a century of disinformation from all parties in the ideological spectrum, everyone is left ignorant of their history, and this work can serve as a means to start over in one direction on a genuine historical reconstruction of the full nature of the dialectal debate that became so derailed by left-right ideological mystifications in the nineteenth century and proceeded to disaster in the twentieth.
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Summary: Evil Empire on trial!! The forgotten dead have a voice.
Review: This book is a painstakingly researched exposition of the most democidal and oppressive regimes in history -- those of the communist bloc. Now the dead have a voice as their muzzled cries long ignored by left-wing revisionist history. While Time magazine was making Uncle Joe Stalin "Man of the Year" and FDR sold out Eastern Europe to communist slavery, Stalin had and continued to order the butchering of his own people by the millions. Leftist apologists for the 20th century's most oppressive totalitarian ideology best crawl back into their collectivist cubbyhole when this title hits the shelves. I believe People who find this book interesting may also like: Death by Government by R.J. Rummel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
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Summary: A Devasting Chronicle of Uncompromising Evil
Review: This is one of those books that every person should read. The book chronicles the crimes of all the Communist regimes from the Bolshevik revolution to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.This book provides a welcome antidote to all the leftist nonsense about Communism is a good idea gone bad.It clearly shows that every Communist Leader from Lenin to Pol Pot was committed to killing off a substantial number of it's own people that it found undesirable. The very same things that Hitler and the Nazis did.In reading the customer reviews I find it incredible that their are still people who defend this evil system.But then maybe we should''nt be surprised. If one believes in socialism or communism one must either embrace Lenin, Stalin,Mao, Castro and it's other bloodthirsty Heroes or admit the bankruptacy of their own ideology. I highly reccomend this book. It is a sobering experience but also an enlightening one.
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Summary: Black Book of Communism
Review: This masterpiece documents all the horrors the Communists committed during their 70-year reign in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and a number of African and Asian countries. The authors meticulously describe why 80 million innocent people had to die for no reason. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to get better acquainted with the 20th century and learn what was going on for decades behind the Iron Curtain.
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Summary: Excellent Work
Review: A long & horrifying chronicle about how communism manages to bring out the worst in everyone. Torture, murder, starvation, terror, labor camps, corruption, forced sterilizations & abortions, racism, rape, cannibalism, biological & chemical warfare, forced relocations, colonization, looting, insanity, (and on and on)...the black book has it all. While no system is perfect, communism has got to be the most evil creation in recorded history. This is an excellent and thorough work on the subject.
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Summary: The Dead Finally Have a Voice
Review: I am very happy that someone finally wrote this book. I know from personal experience and family history that communism kills. But personal stories and family histories run the risk of being dismissed as just that, personal. This comprehensive, well-researched, and straightforward account of communist atrocities escapes that criticism. It has elevated the individual tragedy of each victim of communism to a strong and powerful aggregate cry of warning to future generations about communism. This book gives their deaths a purpose other than silence. I am disappointed that a handful of people have resorted to unsubstantiated political diabtribe, factual misrepresentations, and the tragedies of slavery and the Jewish Holocaust to attack this book and its author. Having lived under communism, I am familiar with such convoluted arguments, unbelievable rationalizations, and irrational reasoning. It is sad to see it in free thinking men and women. I hope people will give this book a serious reading.
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Summary: slanted, biased, but impressively researched
Review: Passions burn so high over the Twentieth Century's most influential(if deadly) ideology, that writing an objective review of a work suchas "Livre Noir" seems nearly impossible. Most [reviewers] seem to be more interested inranting about the evils of communism and equating it with Nazism thanthey are in providing potential readers with an objective look at thequality of historical research and exposition in the book at hand.This glaring loss of focus can probably be forgiven, however, becausethe rapid historical onset of Marxism forced most of the world tochoose sides, and we are still recovering from this polarized climate.However, with the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy over planningand purges, it would seem to me that the McCarthyist gloaters couldkeep it down a bit. They seem to take this book as their bible, buthow many of the Black Book's fans have questioned why two of itseditors later renounced the book and their role in it? This littlefact is ignored by most of our reviewers, but caused quite a stir inthe French press when it was announced. Could it be that chief editorCourtois went just a little to far in his vehement archival slanderingof communism? While this book is by far the best-researched historyof communism ever attempted, it makes no attempt to hide its one-sidedapproach. No significant mention is made by Courtois of the numerousatrocities commited by the worldwide forces of anti-communism, whetherin the form of purges, persecution or proxy war, and their role inmaking communism more a more violent animal as a defensive reaction.This is a shameful omission. But, like many great histories, the bookmanages to rise above its own biases to enthrall the reader and holdfast his attention. The chapters on Afghanistan and Africa will bethe most interesting to well-versed readers, as they explore moreobscure areas of communist history. In short, the book is a must-readfor any student of politics, casual or otherwise, but the disturbingbias of a few of the Black Book's editors must be kept in mind whilereading the book's mind-numbing catalog of atrocities, or else allneutral perspective will be lost.
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