I bought this book for my 12 year old whose reading lexile is well beyond her years. I had read that the book is as much or more suited for adults as it is for kids, but in a search for anything to help teach my intellectually insatiable daughter about communism, I got this. When it got here, I skimmed and read through most of it in about an hour, and it was exactly what I hoped it would be - a non-sectarian (in terms of leftist sectarianism) foray into the basic ideas of communism, which included different ways of thinking about communism and an approach that involves constant self-critique and the advancement of different ways of looking at social and economic relations. The book invites the reader to look at social and economic relations differently than we normally do now, and provokes different ways of thinking about those relationships. So, perfect.
I gave the book to my daughter, and that very night she read the whole thing - only stopping to ask me questions, and to express her emotions regarding how unjust and irrational our economic ordo is. The book definitely sparked an interest in political economy in her. She was so excited about the book that she took it to school with her the next day. This resulted in her social studies teacher going ballistic about the book and castigating my daughter about the horrors of Stalin and Mao and throwing the usual tropes about Cuba and Venezuela and the like at the poor girl. So for the next couple of weeks she would come home from school and list off the evils of communism that her teacher had informed her of that day, and this led to nightly discussions of things like the Cuban embargo and the social conditions of Cubans before the revolution, the Cuban role in ending apartheid in South Africa, how the U.S. response to the Allendes of the world made the Chávezes inevitable, The Spanish Civil War, Trot vs. Stalinist vs. Dem Socialist visions of socialism and how it should be achieved. We also talked about how late capitalism developed following its own bloodbaths (we talked about the mass murders she doesn't learn about in school, like the millions of Indians Churchill killed, and so forth), and how it requires violence. She would go back to school armed with some nuance and counterpoints and the debate would continue. This book definitely encouraged my daughter to have a more open and inquisitive mind concerning different directions we might go in ordering social and economic life, and inclined her to believe that capitalism may be inherently destructive, while communism may need not be so. And it brought about some interesting discussions among her teachers and friends at school.
I don't think the book is the sort of work that is going to convince your typical fever swamp mouth breathing Make America Great Again type, and it surely won't change the mind of your typical Hope and Change Clintonista style liberal who believes in a superficially nice(ish) capitalism run by a bureaucratic elite, but for a kid with an open mind who is intuitive enough to know that most people are just repeating simplistic talking points, it opens the door for different ways of looking at political economy, and for that I am thankful. I would recommend it for any bright kid who is interested in social studies.
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Reviews with images
To say we need to just 'try a little harder' ...
... really diminishes the efforts of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro.But hey everybody! Let's give it one more shot; probably won't devolve into a murderous tyranny this time!Appropriately, the only place communism achieves its promise is in infantile fantasy. A bright, shining beacon of willful ignorance on a dark sea of history; as disconnected from reality as the Instagram account of Bashar Assad's wife.Might be of value to start children with this though, before moving on to "Gulag Archipelago", "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" , "Nothing to Envy".
Top reviews from other countries
Manuel H.
Great for messing up your kids I guess
Reviewed in Germany on December 15, 2017
