Rating: 
Summary: An incredible catalogue of crimes...devastating!
Review: 20th century communism was humanity's apocalypse, this book makes it quite clear. The sheer scale of crimes, of outright murder...it just boggles the mind. It made me realize that the West, despite its many flaws-flaws that should be continually addressed-is still the world's beacon of hope and freedom, and the West's historical record shines all the more brilliant in light of these harrowing records. To think that it was once hip to sneer at anti-communists! There is nothing the West should'nt have done to stop this terrible force, this bloody tide that could have swept humanity into the thresher. The book's intro draws a parallel between Nazism and communism, and this comparison has drawn a great deal of fire. But look at the facts, and then look at your local stalin-apologist in a new light. Jean Paul Sartre should be as reviled as Heidegger. It is ironic that it took the French to produce such a thorough condemnation of Leftism, but here it is...a colossal throw-down of facts, a great black tablet of cosmic crime.
Rating:
Summary: Finally a glimmer of historical justice...
Review: This long-overdue publication gives everybody a chance to understand the fundamental truth so far obvious only to the subjects of this inhuman experiment: Communism is the worst tool of oppression ever created by human mind. Nazism pales in comparison with this cruel, barbaric slaughter of untold millions in the name of some lofty ideals. Hitler was at least honest; Stalin was diabolically hypocritical, and that makes him and his Western dupes so much more guilty...
Rating:
Summary: IT'S ABOUT TIME!
Review: Finally, in a single volume the awful truth is told about the horrors of the communist, Bolshevik, socialist holocaust of the 20th century. If anyone still thinks that communism and socialism are the wave of the future, they must be braindead. This work should be made the required textbook for all students of history.
Rating: 
Summary: Bunk
Review: Many, many statistics and claims are completely (and admittedly) wrong in this book, but HUP refuses to correct them. Mark Kramer, one of the authors, admits to several mistakes, one of which is multiplying death tolls by a factor of at least 10 during translations.Go to Google, type in "MIM," (for Moaist Internationalist Movement), and find their review. They've kept correspondence with some of the authors and publishers about the mistakes, and have a very in-depth review of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Poor and misleading use of sources.
Review: This book contains some of the shoddiest research I have ever come across. This is especially true with regards to the famine in China during the Great Leap Forward.
Page 495 states: "For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15 percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from 33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961.Excluding the deficit in births, which was perhaps as many as 33 million (although some births were merely delayed), Loss of life linked to the famine in the years 1959-1961 was somewhere between 20 million and 43 million."
The sourcs listed are Justin Y. Lin's "Collectivization and China's agricultural crisis in 1959-1961" and and Jasper Becker's "hungry Gosts", pp.270-273.
There are three problems with the quoted text:
1. 29% of China's population did not die in 1960. The correct estimate would be 2.9%. The author made the same mistake (overstating the death rate by a factor of 10) on page 292 when they state that the death rate in Anhui "soared to 68
percent from its normal level at around 15 percent" and then contradict themselves by saying the population fell by 6% of the total. Their source, Roderick Macfarquhar and John Fairbank's statement on page 377 of vol. 14 of the Cambridge History of China gives the correct figure of 68 per thousand. This typo may seem trivial, but in the two statements quoted, they make the error 5 times, each time they stated a death rate. It
demonstrates incredible ignorance to not know that death rates are measured per thousand.
2. The Justin Y. Lin source is not an article which measures the amount of death from famine. It is a largely theoretical explanation of why the communes failed from the standpoint of game theory. Lin gives figures for deaths by citing the final figures arrived at in Basil Ashton et al "Famine in China 1958-61". Why did the authros not bother to look at the
original source of their figures? If they did, they may have come across the discussion by Ashton et al regarding anomalies in the data.
3. Worst of all, the Becker source contradicts their 43 million figure. The author's of the Black Book claim that this figure would exclude the 33 million births that failed to take place, however , Becker states on page 271 that "Whether or not this figure of 40 million is to be trusted, it is now used , almost casually, by various authors inside China who lump deaths and the reduction in births together".
Aside from this, the only time a similar figure is mentioned is in a discussion of a single Chinese report, whose conclusions Becker does not attempt to justify, and which contradicts the rest of his data. Lin's article gives the figure of 30 million deaths.
The author's are just as bad on the Ukranian famine in Russia. They use Robert Conquest's figures, which are based on sources that have been debunked. See Ludo Martens' "Another View of Stalin" or Douglas Tottle's "Fraud, Famine and Fascism : The Ukranian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard". Just ignore the excruciating Marxist polemics contained in these books (you know, all the "Servants of the bourgeiose" type accusations).
Also, Read Richard Evans' "In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past" for his explanation of the dubious methods Conquest used to
arrive at his figures.
Rating:
Summary: Take hearsay and hate, then multiply by any number you like!
Review: This huge study is valueless, because its statistics and conclusions are derived solely from the authors' fevered imaginations. They prefer prejudice to evidence, blind anti-communist 'faith' to reason. The recently opened Russian archives show that the true figure of Soviet citizens who died in the 1930s is about 300,000 deaths.
Most writers on the subject, including the authors of this tome, have relied not on the archives, but on Robert Conquest's estimates. Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, has explained how Conquest reached his figures: "Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (New York, 1986) argues that the `dekulakization' of the early 1930s led to the deaths of 6,500,000 people. But this estimate is arrived at by extremely dubious methods, ranging from reliance on hearsay evidence through double counting to the consistent employment of the highest possible figures in estimates made by other historians."
For example, the American historian Charles Maier stated that Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler. But Evans observed that Maier could only reach this conclusion by accepting "Conquest's implausible and inflated estimates without question, while omitting deaths caused by Nazi aggression in the East (which also, apart from military and exterminatory action, led to famines and deportations). The number of deaths caused by Nazism's eastward drive may itself have been as many as 20 million." (Richard Evans, In Hitler's shadow, Tauris, 1989, page 170.) In fact, to reach his judgement of comparative responsibility, Maier simply omitted all the 50 million people killed in the world war that Hitler started.
It's also worth remembering that it was the Red Army who defeated 70% of Hitler's armies. It was the Red Army who played the largest part in stopping Hitler, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.
Rating: 
Summary: A Dry, Sober Accounting of the Crimes of Communism
Review: Stalin was quoted as saying "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." In The Black Book of Communism, Stephane Courtois, a former French Communist, and his fellow scholars have tried to document the 20-century crimes of the Communist regimes. Utilizing newly opened archives as well as established sources, the European researchers have come up with a sobering death toll - up to 25 million in the Soviet Union, some 65 million in Communist China, almost 2 million in Cambodia and tens of thousands more in places like Vietnam and Cuba. In addition to the tens of millions of deaths, the book documents the repression and cultural desecration brought on by Communist regimes from East Germany to Romania to Tibet. This book isn't easy reading but it is a staggering account of the depravity of totalitarianism.
Rating:
Summary: The Black Book of Socialism: a "Wholecaust" by RexCurry.net
Review: Stephanie Courtois' book "The Black Book of Communism" is an eye-popping show stopper. My only confusion is why it is labeled "communism" (after all it was the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics) and why it is distinguished from the National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party (Nazis). They were all the same, and this great book proves it. Socialists are nuclear bombs. Socialism is nuclear war.
The book provides interesting comparisons in its death to that of R. J. Rummel's article in the "Encyclopedia of Genocide" (1999) and his book "Death by Government" both also at Amazon. The numbers are almost too vast to know from the socialist trio of atrocities: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 62 million deaths? People's Republic of China, 35 million? the National Socialist German Workers' Party, 21 million? Together, they committed the worst atrocities of all time. Courtois and Rummel have lots of info on what the journalist Rex Curry calls "deniers of the socialist 'Wholecaust'" of which the monstrous Holocaust was a part.
The book provides a lot of information that explains why media use the word "Nazi" to cover-up for the horrid "National Socialist German Workers' Party," in a vain effort to rehabilitate socialism. Most media will not fully identify the atrocious "National Socialist German Workers' Party" and use abbreviations in a hackneyed lazy manner, so that there is now rampant ignorance of the full phrase in the public, and now even in the media. I hope this book helps to end some of the ignorance.
The media and the general public seem unaware that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the National Socialist German Workers' Party were allies upon entering WWII.
Indeed, it is frightening how close the U.S. came (and is still coming) to deadly socialism in that the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag was written by a self-proclaimed National Socialist in the U.S. and had a straight-armed salute which was the origin of the salute of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
An easy way to remember that Nazis were self-proclaimed socialists is that the swastika resembles two "S" letters overlapping and the Nazis often used stylized "S" lettering in their symbols.
Many writers attempt to minimize the horror of the socialist Wholecaust by only mentioning the part of the horrid National Socialist German Workers' Party. That doesn't occur in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Painful to read in quite a few ways
Review: Someone who is looking for a book of history that is fascinating or informative should definately take a look at this; someone seeking to be entertained or cheered, however, should not. As other reviewers have noted, the amount of information in the BBoC is overwhelming, both in the scale of the detail and in the graphic nature of the many atrocities it describes. As one of the first really comprehensive studies of the history of communism that came out since the Cold War ended, this is a book as informative as it is necessary. However, the climate has also harmed the material the authours could use for research. As many American, Russian, and other documents are still classified and will be for some time, the sources for many events in the book are a mix of more "public" sources - letters, newspapers, and television - at the expense of "internal" primary sources. The later events in the book have to rely on eyewitness accounts and second-hand materials; while these provide a huge amount of information, many of the events in some chapters simply get boiled down to lists of atrocities. These get handled well in some cases - the sections on North Korea and China in particular - and poorly in others. My main problem with the book, aside from understandable source issues, is the writing style. Have a glass of water handy when reading the BBoC, because you'll need a reminder of what things that aren't incredibly dry look and feel like at points. This is a style issue, however, for a book which is not meant to entertain but educate, and it doesn't harm the quality of information this book gives in the least. All in all, the Black Book of Communism is a book which is at times tedious, but through its entire length it remains as informative as it is visceral, and is worth a look at anyone who is seriously interested in "the other side" of the Cold War era. This book is neither a fun nor a light read, and does not intend to be one. It is instead a very densely-packed collection of facts, figures, names, dates, places, and events, all brought together into one place to give one gigantic perspective on what the entire Communist world was like for most of the twentieth century. Despite its flaws, the Black Book of Communism deserves both attention and praise on those grounds alone.
Rating:
Summary: Bunk
Review: Communism made the world bloody??? NO capitalism is responsible for more deaths than fascism and communism. The USA a bastion of imperialism and oppression has killed more people than Mao Hitler and Stalin doubled. Capitalism is a more warlike philosophy and the wars that are fought are soley for money. I dont defend the USSR it has commited many atrocities but not because it is communist. Name a capitalist country that hasn't started a war. Why we are killing innocent people right now and sending them to prison camps and torturing them for speaking against our nation in Iraq. We have the illusion of liberty and freedom but only for the 250 million americans out of the 7 billion people and the even more sad thing is that this has only been true for scarcely 40 years! Every capitalist nation is evil why do you think they always attack leftist regimes and support right wing fascists? Does that sound fair to you? no it isn't capitalism defends this by saying well we are just lucky trying to cover up the fact that they deserve wealth no more than the people we have driven into starvation and oppression. Every war we have fought was fought for money all the USA cares about is protecting its bank and corporate interests. The USA goes to war whenever are oil interests are threatend (Iraq and soon Venezuela) so which to you looks more reppressive? Communism is for the interests of the workers it looks beyond race and religion capitalism doesnt. Your book and philosophy sicken me you are a brain washed american whose only reason for critisizing communism is to defend your lavish lifestyle and easy living so you dont have to think of the millions of dead and impoverished people around the world that capitalist imperialism is responsible for. Maybe someday you will become educated and learn that equality is the answer and communism is equality.
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