My Life [Paperback]

Leon Trotsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1970

Autobiographical account by a leader of the October 1917 Russian revolution, the Soviet Red Army, and the battle initiated by Lenin against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the best books of reminiscences.... [Trotsky's] capacity for not measuring the historical process by the yardstick of his personal fate ... makes this book so much better than the unconvincing apologias of kings and statesmen.... [The] author is obviously a born writer." -- The Nation

Product Details

• Paperback: 695 pages
• Publisher: Pathfinder Press (NY) (June 1, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873481445
• ISBN-13: 978-0873481441
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #203,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life is Beautiful when you fight to change the world!, February 18, 2002

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life (Paperback)

The phrase "Life is Beautiful" in the Italian film came from Leon Trotkys's last testament. It was written in exile in Mexico. At the time Trotsky's friends, family, and comrades were being harassed, slandered and murdered by Stalin, when he himself faced imminent assasination. He also faced death from the growing illnesses that had slowed him. Yet, in his testament he proclaimed that life is beautiful. Life must be cleansed of the evil and garbage Capitalism and Stalinism have left to this world.

Read this book and you will see how Trotsky's life became valuable for him because he decided to fight oppression, decided to learn about the world to fight, and never stopped fighting. Maybe your life can be beautiful if you read this book, and decide to fight like Trotsky did.

The introduction by the late Joseph Hansen Trotsky's secretary in Mexico is worth the price of the book. Joe explains how the household and work center in Mexico functioned, about how Trotsky valued hard work, but also valued celebrating comrades birthdays, hobbies like raising rabbits, trips to sites of Mexican history. Reading this also tells you how Joe organized the staff at World Outlook/ Intercontinental Press, working with him was one of the great privileges of my life.

In these pages and memoirs of Trotsky by Joe, George Novack, Farrell Dobbs, and other comrades who knew Trotskty, you could find how serious Trotsky enjoyed and embraced life. In Turkey if he wanted to go fishing, he went to sea with Turkish fishers in their trawlers. If he wanted to raise rabbits as a hobby, he soon was taking care of something bordered on a commercial rabbit farm. Both in valuing work--chained to his desk was the term Trotsky passed down--and valuing parties and celebrations of new people coming onto the staff and leaving, Trotsky made his life beautiful.

Read this book, valued as much as a literary work as a political statement, and learn how you can make your life beautiful.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It changed the way I look at my life, November 29, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: My Life (Paperback)

A love story. An adventure novel. A mystery. A philosophical treatise. When I read it, My Life set my soul on fire. In a world of injustice and irrationality, My Life shows a world of men as they can be and should be. A hymn to the nobility of man's spirit, My Life tells of a beautiful man who sips tea and discusses poems and his quest for an ideal. It tells of a Russia in which scruffy workers and politicians/criminals in Moscow try to smother the productive men of ability in that country and everywhere else. It tells of one man, who, in order to save the world, had to give up what he loved most: playing golf. Upholding heroism, bravery, and geniality, My Life is not only a philosophical triumph, but a literary one as well. Leon Trotsky's 150-page masterpiece shows such integration, such skill -- every word was written and rewritten until the sound, the meaning, and the meter were not only perfect for the sentence, but for the entire book as well. Written with unimaginable passion, My Life elicits so much feeling on the part of the reader -- as I read it, certain phrases or sentences made me just lean back, close my eyes, and savor the words on my tongue. Controversial, intellectually challenging, enthralling, exciting, and totally entertaining -- My Life shows Trotsky's genius as a writer and his ability as a storyteller. Each sentence conveys the content of his mind and the passion of his heart. Read this book and your life will never be the same.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Against mystification., January 7, 2002

By 

C. E. R. Mendonça "Carlos Eduardo Rebello de ... (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Life (Paperback)

When I decided to write this review, I had to choose between the various reasons why it's so beautiful and important. But, above all, I think that, in a world where the necessity of Marxist was supposedly to be more deeply felt than ever, what repels most people that would be liable to lend an ear to it is the repelling Stalinist mythology of the revolutionary as the relentless, ruthless, single-minded, google-eyed fanatical. Trotsky, on the contrary begins by assessing that, although his life was out of the ordinary, he neverthless remained a men with a penchant for a well-ordered ordinary life; that he found pleasure in seeing a well-ordered table or a well-kept fence; that he didn't becomne a revolutionary out of a feeling of opression, but because of being faced with a life that, although prosperous, offered him nothing but grey drudgery and no opprtunity for individual achievement; that he, like all revolutionaries, was a man like any other. I think that would be reason enough to commend this modern classic to the reader of today, outside from the wonderful style, the importance of the events narrated and so much else.