Reflections on a Ravaged Century

by Robert Conquest, Weil, Conquest

Book Overview

Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian." As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393048187
• ISBN13: 9780393048186
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 317 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating tour of mankind's worst century.

Robert Conquest is one of the true Heroes of the twentieth century. In books like ''Harvest of Sorrow'' and the''Great terror'' He exposed the murderous evil of stalinism which for sheer numbers causes Hitler's holocaust to pale by comparison. Yet for all His trouble Conquest was denounced by the international media establishment and the Apostles of political correctness for ''overreaching''. His allegations against the ''Workers Paradise'' could not possibly be true. Well now the Evil Empire has fallen and the archives are open and the accuracy of Conquest's work is proven beyond all doubt.No man on earth has a better right to say ''I told you so''! This book is a series of essays about the twentieth century and the ideas that turned it into a slaughterhouse; Communism, Fascism and Utopianism. All of these ideologies are rooted in the idea that the state knows better than the Individual about how to solve society's problems.And that the state should have whatever power necessary to solve those problems. Conquest shows us what the twentieth century should have shown us that this type of thinking is the slippery slope to Auschwitz and the Gulag.Sadly Conquest shows us that mankind appears not to have learned it's lesson. This is an excellent book which provides more than sufficient armor for the continuing culture wars of the 21st century. I highly reccomend it

Important insights and cultural memory

This is an important work because too much cultural memory about the realities of the twentieth century is already fading. Why worry about the Soviet Union or facism? Because the error of believing in strong central planning leads to real misery on a massive scale. This means real lives and real people are ground up in the machinery of a state bureaucracy that is pursuing horribly misguided ends by cruel and ridiculous means.Mr. Conquest does a wonderful job in aiding our cultural memory. His beautiful writing keeps us involved, his insights teach us, his conclusions are persuasive to me. If they aren't to you, fine, but you will have been given much to think about.

Among the finest books of the 20th century

Conquest is an almost peerless historian of tyranny. The present volume summarizes his overview of the bloodiest century ever known, and analyses the evils of communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Conquest's thinking is deep, original, and courageous, his prose exceptional, and his research impeccable. This is the culminating work in a long career marked by dedication to illuminating painful truths about the Soviet Union and international communism. Very highly recommended.

The worst of Conquest is better than the best of Chomsky

Every time I read Conquest, I think how fortunate it is that we have had this excellent a man ponder the large questions of the twentieth century. Every page of Conquest reads like somethign you wish you had written: thoughts unconsidered, points missed, sublime ideas brought to life. And of course, there is this book- the century he got right from the very beginning. And the century to which we in the rest of the world are just now beginning to catch up with how correct Conqeust was. And we all need to be aware- Conquest figured out the important questions of communism right before anyone else did. Chris Hitchens in his blurb got this one right- you learn more from Conquest just in a glance than you learn from streams of discourse from others. I don't aways agree with Conqeust, but even I must give the man his due: when people are asked "what was the twentieth century?", one of the first books given will be thoughts by its best commentator- Robert Conquest. When we are all dead and buried, this man will live in the minds of students. Buy this book. Heck, buy any book by Conquest. It's hard to go wrong with the man. The man introduces the effects of ideology in the most convincing way possible. The trenchant conservative Florence King once said of Chris Hitchens, "If Chris Hitchens is a communist, I wanna be a communist too". I remember a rant about Conquest by some radical or another, and had a thought: if Robert Conquest is a McCarthyite right wing zealot, I wanna be a McCarthyite right wing zealot too.

A brilliant skewering of Communist apologists.

Far anyone interested more than casually in 20th Century history, Robert Conquest's reflection on the century will teach and illuminate. The most interesting part of this excellent book was Conquest's review of the history of Soviet Communism and his skewering of those who spent long and supposedly distinguished careers arguing that Marxism is a benign way to build a new and better world. As Conquest points out, the facts have always led to the opposite conclusion and these "fellow-travellers" knew it and ignored them. In fact, what Marxism has left behind in Russia is a devastated industrial base, the absence of individual iniative, and a population psychically damaged. In the guise of building a worker's state, communism built a monument to everything that is anti-human, anti-compassion, and anti-freedom. Conquest has never shied from his views, even when they were unpopular. We owe him a lot for his unstinting criticism of one of mankind's worst historical aberrations. His warnings about the future should be carefully considered by all of us.