"Inside the Soviet Army" is a true classic of its genre, an illuminating reading experience that reveals the true nature of the Soviet military and the men behind it. Though the end of the Cold War rendered many of the writer's specific points obsolete, the chapters on the psychology of war, the design and implementation of strategy and tactics, and military economy are timeless. While many of the author's opinions are highly debatable to say the least, his sympathies clearly lie with the United States and its allies and his final question, "Why don't you resist?" is a resonant challenge to every free man to take up the fight against tyranny--wherever it may be--before it's too late.

If you thought that the western armies were the King of all armies then read this "inside the soviet army". Your mind would change....forever. Concerned about the peace of the world? Then read this book, it has all the terrifying facts about how the Soviet army operates in the heat of battle and how they organise their armies during peace. This book i guarantee, would change your mind about the Soviets. A great read!!

The book is a very important read for anyone interested in the soviet union, the books title says it the soviet army (really he means armed forces) but it is gives you a understanding of the soviet rulers and their style and paranoia. It is a good book and you will learn a lot about the soviet military and government.

This book discusses key post-Soviet archival discoveries and discusses a critical historical issue -- the COORDINATION OF THE GESTAPO AND NKVD in liquidating the Polish elites as part of the 1939 Pact and invasion. That was more than enough to get me intrigued enough to buy this book. There's a lot more that I learned from the author's research -- even as an analyst in this field (former, now with the Cold War over).

The world still knows very little about the Katyn Massacre, and until recently many people believed that the massacre had been committed by the Germans, so effective was the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union and its supporters and collaborators the worldover. Today we know the truth. The other major event was Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, instituted by Stalin and the communist regime, which the Soviet government was able to keep hidden for decades, and which is only now beginning to be acknowledged.

Yes. The Katyn massacre is a grim reminder of what the Soviet Union and its supporters and sympathizers were all about. Like the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, the Katyn Massacre has been kept hidden by the Soviet Union until its disintegration. Both are still not widely known - unlike the Jewish Holocaust. Far too little information has been brought to light on either subject. More needs to be done. "Katyn" is a must book for those who want to understand the brutality of the former Soviet Union.

Cannon never explains numbers here. Yet, this is the history of a group of revolutionists who went from two or three leaders of
the Communist party who learned of Trotsky's critique of Stalin, to a group of a few dozens--The Generals without an Army they
were called. They went from only a few to merging and mixing with new currents of workers who came forward as the CIO Upsurge came forward. Their principles helped spark the organization of workers in the great strikes in Minneapolis in 1934 and aftewrards, then to influence workers in the sit down strikes in Flint and Dearborn and Detroit, and to lead demonstrations of tens of thousands against American Nazis. Then to find hundreds of young workers, intellectuals, and student youth in the Socialist party and battle the reformists there, to build Found the Socialist Workers party, founded with more than a thousand members in 1938. But this is not about those numbers. Through most of history, real revolutionists real communists have been forced to fight in small organizations like the movement Cannon built. What this is about is the principles,
the ideas, the lessons, the history, how to do things theoretically, how to do them practically, and how to do them right.

Like all of Cannon's writing, there is so much humor, wit, and much wisdom about not only politics but life on this planet in general.

Aquí se ve la historia temprana de cómo construyeron el núcleo de un partido revolucionario de las masas que participará en la revolución norteamericana que viene. También es la historia de la lucha por la continuidad comunista internacional con su guía de acción frente la más grande obstáculo a la victoria revolucionaria que hubo desde los veinte hasta los cuarenta ( y más despues ): el estalinismo, el contrario del comunismo.

También aquí se cuenta la historia de la participación de este núcleo en la lucha dentro de la clase trabajadora norteamericana como dirigentes de algunas de las huelgas más militantes de esos años.

Finalmente se explica la estrategia para vencer el fascismo: seguir el ejemplo del frente unido, como hizo el partido bolchevique en la Rusia en 1917 durante su trayectoria al poder. ¡Nosotros los trabajadores necesitamos hoy y necesitáramos mañana entender esta experiencia en todos nuestros países para vencer sobre la marcha capitalista actual hacia fascismo y la guerra mundial!

Sufrimos una época de guerras y revolución porque el sistema actual, fundado en la avaricia individual, padece cada vez más de sus trastornos mortales. Ya que año con año se avecina la Tercera Guerra Mundial, la editorial Pathfinder nos aconseja aprender de las otras dos ocasiones en que nos llevó al borde de la barbarie.

Los libros de Cannon no son sobre el pasado, sino cómo sacar mayor ventaja de las aperturas y oportunidades que necesariamente se van a presentar en el camino para forjar partidos de los trabajadores de común acuerdo en aprender de las luchas de los explotados donde sea que surgen y unidos en la trayectoria de construir un mundo libre del capitalismo.

Cannon era miembro fundador del movimiento del Obrero Mundial (IWW), los antecedentes del Partido Comunista y el Partido mismo. En los 20 era dirigente de la Defensa Internacional del Obrero (ILD) y fue representante norteamericano en el presidio del Internacional Comunista con Lenin y Trotsky.

Dado que el estalinismo ya no trompea el camino para que los luchadores se reúnen, hoy en día el movimiento comunista no necesita valerse del nombre "trotskista" para diferenciarse de los estalinistas; con este simple cambio de nomenclatura el contenido de La historia del trotskismo estadounidense sigue en pie de lucha. Traza la continuidad ideológica y marca la pauta para que detengamos la marcha de los explotadores hacia su tercera guerra mundial, que ellos mismos no pueden parar debido a su permanente caída en la taza de ganancias.

Organizing and Defending a Revolution

Leon Trotsky was a participant in the most significant class battles of the 20th century. This book collects some of Trotsky's key speeches and writings from the Russian Revolution, and his effort to defend it even when persecuted by the Stalin gang that usurped power and murdered the revolution's leaders. It is a great introduction to the Russian revolution and to Trotsky's other works. Read about how the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies (Trotsky was the President) organized the insurrection; the revolutionary government's efforts to lead working people forward; how Stalin undermined the Soviet Union by seeking a pact with Hitler.

I found a lot to be learned from this collection of talks, reports and declarations by this leader of the Russian Revolution, given in wildly different settings to different audiences, over decades of revolutionary working class struggle.

Above all, you see Trotsky appealing to, educating, and inspiring workers and peasants with an understanding of the challenges they faced and a confidence in their ability to take on unprecedented historical tasks.

His speech in a Czarist court defending the workers councils (Soviets) of the 1905 Russian revolution is of the same spirit as Nelson Mandela or Fidel Castro when they in turn were on trial by their oppressors. Read the messages and transcripts of speeches given during the whirlwind of the October Revolution in Russia-- a working class leader in day-by-day action.

And especially worth studying, Trotsky's talks to gatherings of workers, soldiers, and party members analyzing the changing relations between the major world powers and between the toiling and exploiting classes of those nations, and the different policies pursued by the new Soviet government as these circumstances changed-- you'll learn a lot about how society works and what it takes to really change it.

Trotsky was a great orator, a great writer, but above all he was impassioned by his faith in the power of working people to change the world, a vision he never lost. This is where the power of these great speeches comes from. Read them and learn how to harness that power for today's fights. The speeches here don't appeal to cheap emotion, nor do they appeal to fancy phraseology, they appeal to reason, they appeal to history, they appeal to the power of working people to change the world. Read these speeches not for history, but for how their ideas can be used to fight our way out of the disaster modern capitalism has left the world in, and to find a way out for the peoples in the former Stalinized countries.

Lowell is of the vanguard of American twentieth century poets, a man who created many brilliant works other than the two joined in this volume. In such poems in Life Studies as Beyond the Alps and A Mad Negro Soldier Confined in Munich, as well as his portraits of various friends and family, we discover a man capable of both acid humor and outright sadness. However, in Life Studies, these excellent poems are overshadowed by the towering biographical essay 91 Revere Street. In this touching memoir, Lowell describes distant, illustrious relatives, Amy Lowell being a famous but ostracized example, friendships wrecked in childhood, disquietude over a girlfriend who soils herself in class (in his embarrassment, Lowell sits in it), his formative years on the periphery of polite, conservative Bostonian society, and his fathers coarse, difficult superiors and buddies that cropped up in the father's job with the Navy. Though his poems here are outstanding, an uncomfortable question arises when one considers this essay: Would Lowell have been better off to employ his time as a prose stylist, not a poet?

For the Union Dead validates Lowell's decision to declare poetry his mode of expression. Poems such as the dolorous My Last Evening with Uncle Devereaux Winslow and Terminal Days at Beverly Farm expose a man groping for hope after the deaths of close relatives; Waking in the Blue and Myopia: A night explore, respectively, Lowell's mental illness and attendant three month hospitalization, and a night of insomnia that becomes a maelstrom of tortured reflections and half-hewn thoughts; The Drinker explores alcoholism as a product of foiled love, with a question as to whether pathology or sheer carelessness and love of idleness is the underlying shibboleth. Water, the poem that stoked my love for Lowell, uses a maritime theme to express sorrow over a lost love. Beyond the Alps, from Life Studies, is reprised here with an elided stanza reinserted at the behest of coeval John Berryman.

Lowell is one of those poets so gifted, so erudite, so steeped in classical literature, it's hard to grasp that, as he explains it, he was "less rather than more bookish than most children." Much of the isolation evinced in Lowell's poetry, as well as the restlessness of his life, both as youth and adult, are radiantly eviscerated in these two collections.

Most of us probably first read Robert Lowell in high school, and I remember being both repulsed and fascinated by Life Studies when I was a teenager. I am no longer repulsed, but simply fascinated by Lowell's writing. Life Studies' haunting biographies of Lowell's relatives frame the poet's autobiographical memoir of growing up with "no girls or undesirables in [his] set"; his attention to detail constantly mesmerizes the reader as we tour a New England catalogue of memorabilia, illness, and affect. Lowell's resolutely melancholy, nostalgic, and idiosycratic tone reminds the reader that poetry may speak most generally when it is most particular in its subject. I've spent twenty years thinking about these poems, and the thoughts are never stale, even if the lives they chronicle are preternaturally decayed.

For a long time, one of my favorite poems has been Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour", but I have never read the book which was the context around it. Lowell is one of those writers who are often pushed down your throat as being "The Most Important Poet Ever!" by college professors and I have to admit that this attitude lead me to resist reading further.

I want to say that this was a mistake, because of how much I enjoyed this book, but I'm not sure how well I could have appreciated these poetry books had I been younger. They are not simple about anything they touch-- not histories (public or private), not love, not death, not depression. They are complicated words that are painted in detailed layers, so the richness gets deeper the longer you look. The setting is so subtle that when Lowell does say something overt, it comes as a distinct shock.

I didn't want to stop reading the book when it was over, and went back and started reading the poems again-- it was that compelling.

Kramer's works are visionary paintings similar to Blake's etchings, providing an array of colorful oil works which are eye-catching. Modern spiritual art at its best.

When I received my copy of Moments of Union, I thought I would glance through it and save it for a rainy day. But no, once I opened it, I could not lay it down. Every painting had a gift of vivid colors and patterns. Gradually, my mind surrendered to something within that was far deeper. Hours later when I closed the book, I felt whole, as if all the parts of my being had joined together in this extraordinary shower of colors dancing freely across the pages. Next, I went through each page a second time to intellectually grasp why these paintings are so fulfilling and how Kramer's use of colors could stimulate such a sense of joy! Instead, I selected 15 favorites, the ones I would love to frame if I ever have the temerity to cut them out. I highly recommend evenings with this book to bring back an inner balance of heart, mind, and soul.

During the Great Depression, Hal Kramer sold one at a time out of an old metal suitcase. He has worked ship-board at sea, learned the trade of lithography, started his own successful publishing company, sold it, and retired. Then, at 70 years of age, he began a new, phenomenally-successful publishing company, H J Kramer.

Now 86 years old, Hal Kramer is reborn once again as a gifted visionary artist. He paints not things, but energy, and his book, Moments of Union, is radiant.

The Introduction, and inspiring story of Hal's career -- from industriousness to success to art to spiritual expressionism -- is worth the price of the book. But it is only the beginning.

I found it impossible to decide which paintings are my favorites, because each page I turn brings a new epiphany. Moments of Union is a book one can keep for many years and never grow tired of revisiting its pages.

Each of his paintings is like an oracle, in which we see our own inspiration, our own hopes and dreams.

Because beauty is in the beholder's eye, I urge you to open its pages and delight in your own moments of union.

Read this book and you'll learn about the life of a heroic woman, but also about the bitter struggles working people fought in the US a hundred years ago. You won't get this history on the History Channel!
Pathfinder Press is dedicated to, among other things, publishing the speeches and writings of revolutionary figures like Mother Jones. So, in this book, you won't read some professor's interpretation of her, you'll read her own words. And what words she spoke! Her speeches and letters spring from the page full of passion and courage.
She went to where the miners were fighting and dying and stood up to the cops and the goons who tried to intimidate her. She was braver and bolder than most (male) labor leaders of her time, and in every way a superior human being to those who claim to "lead" the labor unions today.

Coal miners and retirees are still dying of Black Lung disease without proper medical care or compensation, and Black Lung widows are once again marching on Washington. These are good reasons to read this inspiring volume, which captures the historic voice of the coal miners-Mother Jones. A woman of the working class, she took part in almost every major battle by coal miners from the 1890s through the 1920s. She declared her solidarity with all victims of class rule from New England to Japan and left the world with many famous dictums of the struggle: "Don't mourn, organize!" or "I'm not here to beg , I want to fight and take what belongs to us!" She joined social struggles like the fight against child labor. When the newspapers refused to cover a strike involving child textile workers because the mill owners held stock in the newspapers, Mother Jones declared: "Well, I've got stock in these little children and I'll arrange a little publicity." And she did. While the U.S. was waging war on Mexico, Mother Jones was meeting with Pancho Villa to promote working class solidarity. We are also reminded that the task she described is still our task today: "Never before in human history were men and women called upon to link hands in the mighty battle for the emancipation of the working class from the robbing class." Mother Jones proves that you can't count yourself or any one else out-Mother Jones didn't become an activist until she was in her fifties. This is the total book by and about Mother Jones, with valuable background material by Philip Foner, the noted historian.

A wonderful collection: nearly 40 speeches by Mother Jones, the tireless champion of workers in struggle at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. Also includes articles by Jones written for labor and socialist papers of the time, press reports about her activities, and dozens of letters she wrote to other labor and socialist leaders.

Mother Jones traveled incessantly, giving speeches and organizing coal miners and copper miners, textile workers, construction workers. She exposed and decried the abuses of the capitalist system. She stood up to the richest employers, their cops, courts, the National Guard, the U.S. Congress and presidents. She championed workers framed-up and victimized in the course of many struggles-- including insurgent fighter from Mexico during its 1910 revolution.

Her courage, honesty and perseverance should be a better-known example for workers, farmers and young people today. She has lots of short, snappy observations I find useful to raise at work, to help get others thinking a bit. And I found her letters, which reflect her striving to promote the most uncompromising, militant and class-conscious wing of unions and the Socialist Party, especially interesting.

Fantastic book! It's a real pleasure to see some of the lower level staff/cabinet people given credit for an historic 8 years. Before I read this book, I had no idea who Richard Pearl was and now I understand why the Reagan Presidency was noted for it's "hawkish" pro-defense policies. The best history reading is one that reads like a novel while still able to get across all pertinate points and this book does so overwhelmingly. "On the Brink" doesn't necessarily cover in detail all the policies and activities of the Reagan administration (like Lebanon or Iran-Contra...read Lou Cannon's "Reagan" for this) but those it does cover, it does so in "delicious/readable" prose. Highly recommended!

This was a very good book. The pace and detail kept me glued. I was surprised, however, at how little Reagan is mentioned in the book, given the subtitle. One of the other customer reviewers had it wrong, it was not *one* man (Reagan) who ended the cold war. Rather it was a collection of men and women, and this book brings you their stories (with particular emphasis on Richard Perle).

These were historic times, and while the biased official reviewer is correct in stating that few pages are given to the internal failings of the eastern bloc, to suggest that the hard-line stance of the Reagan administration wasn't the primary instrument of the Cold War victory is ludicrous. It was the Reagan administration after all who seized on the USSR's problems and pushed them over the brink.

This is a wonderful, to-the-point saga of the years that changed history! It should be a textbook--and the only reason it WON'T be is that it crosses too many agendas!

BTW--why is this book out of print?

This lucid and unfailingly honest account of the process of coming to terms with the loss of "self" is simply a grace for those with ears to hear. Ms. Roberts, a former nun, has walked the contemplative path to the point where it disappears into nowhere and then, remarkably enough, kept walking. Her personal experiences and reflections on the journey are invaluable to those traveling a similar route; along with the writings of St. John of the Cross, her books (I include "The Experience of No-Self" as well) are simply the most nourishing of mana for those lost in the desert of God, as well as for those who have lived in the desert and are being called at last back to the city. The straightforwardness of her writing and her contemporary reality are a blessing. No one tells it like it is about the dark night of the soul better than Bernadette Roberts, and her books have been sustaining companions to me for almost twenty years. They were all I could read, at many points. These are not books for scholars; these are books for those in the grip of the real thing.

Great book. The Noself state is indeed controversial, but not new, at least in India where the benefitiary of such condition is called a Jivanmukti (liberated while alive). For centuries there detractors said it was not possible, that at Mukta (liberation), the Jiva (man) automatically becomes a Videhamukta, dies and merges with the Father. But Ramana Maharshi, short of calling himself a Jivanmukti, often and clearly defined the characteristics of that state, and said it existed. It is clearly a state of Noself, without the sense of "I". To the eyes of the world this person appears to engage in activity, but does nothing, thus creating no new Karma with absence of doership. The unfathomable state of the Jnani (pronounced Guiani in Sanskrit). Mukta or liberation is indeed dissolution of the self (ego). This Ramana also defined as Sahaja Stithi, or state of constant Samadhi. Samadhi, the saint of Arunachala said, was our normal condition. Wisely, Ms. Roberts defines experiences of Nirvikalpa Samadhi, like the one sustained by Henry Suso and quoted in her book as temporary glimpses, marvelous! She adds they are a real awakening to our real nature. Ramana said Nirvikalpa Samadhi was like a bucket temporarily submersed in a well, the Self, which resumed its activity (the little self) when retrieved from the well. Take heart, this state of Noself is certainly not to be feared, and it seems to be unavoidable. However, Paul Brunton was critical of the possibility of living with total absence of "I", How, Brunton asked, the body functions without this sense?.

Whether coming from a Christian deistic or a Buddhist non-deistic background, Roberts speaks to the moment when God and the self disappear in a kind of intimate togetherness. God is gone as an object of our search/worship/longing...And the self is gone with God, so there is no one remaining who would search/worship/long in the first place. This is unlike the mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, for whom only God remains as the self is taken up within God. And it is unlike the existentialists, for whom only the self remains after God is removed to Nothingness. We are simply left with life as it is...a kind of blend of Heidegger's non-self Dasein and Zen's everyday mind. That is, one can arrive (or find oneself there) by other means. So what is interesting about Roberts' book is not so much the path that is described as it is the place that the path leads to. The no-self is full of grace but without a heavenly source of it. The no-self has returned to its pre-spiritual essence, which is actually the non-objectified spiritual reality in which there is no difference between the spiritual and the non-spiritual. But Bernadette Roberts describes it much better than these words of mine.

If you want to understand the world of today you have to work at understanding how it got to be the way it is. This is one of those books that is critical to doing that, I don't say that lightly. This book is what is known as a primary source. It is the record of one, actually several, of the crucial political battles of the last century, told by some of the leading participants in their own words. It is not a history written decades later by someone to explain what went wrong, but a record of a battle as it progressed.

Reading this book you get a better understanding of the following: How it was that the domestic and foreign policy of the new Soviet Union began to deteriorate from a revolutionary one to one that put the narrow needs of day to day diplomacy and deal making first. How the Chinese Communist Party was formed and how it developed. What type of revolution was it's leadership trying to make? Why were the U.S., England, Japan and France so hostile to it? How and why did the Stalinists and Maoists gain leadership and themselves come into being? And much else.

This book is made up of an impressive number of documants, speeches and reports principally by Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the Russian revolution who would not sell out and died fighting Stalin and the destruction of the revolution. The introduction adds much to the book in bringing things up to date. I think this book is useful for historians, anyone wanting to know more about China and the revolution there, and any revolutionaries of today who want to learn from one of the best. It can be particularly useful to political minded workers and young people from Asia

What impresses me about this book is Trotsky's impassioned duty and determination to build a world revolution of the oppressed and to clear the way for the working people of China from the waste, confusion, and defeats that Stalinism of the Stalin and Mao varieties have imposed on them.

Thirty years ago many people would have thought reading a book about the liberation of a country from semicolonialism would no longer be necessary as we enter the 21st Century. However, it seems that lead by the USA, the imperialist powers of Western Europe and Japan are in a growing drive to deepen their control over countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Sadly, the lessons in this book drawn from the struggle of peasants and workers in China in the first 40 years of this century, are becoming more and more applicable around the world.

The Chinese Revolution was one of the great developments of the 20th century, and the challenges and lessons it provides remain of great importance today. Imperialism and imperialist war, colonialism, revolutionary Marxism vs. Stalinism and Maoism, concepts of armed struggle, mass struggle, of constructing a revolutionary party, the character of a workers and peasants government, of a workers-peasant alliance-- all were tested in the turbulent, living experience of social crisis, repression, war and massive worker and peasant uprisings.

This lengthy collection brings together the writings of Leon Trotsky on China from 1925 to his death in 1940. Trotsky was, along with V. I. Lenin, a central leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the early years of the Communist International. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Trotsky led the fight against the degeneration of that revolution and the rise of a conservative, privileged bureaucracy headed by Josef Stalin. Revolutionary policies in China at the time were at the heart of the differences between revolutionaries and Stalinists. Trotsky gives detailed and extensive analysis very useful today, both for the issues covered and as an example of how to use the Marxist method to orient revolutionary fighters in the living world.

The collection includes a substantial introduction by long-time Chinese revolutionary Peng Shu-tse, covering the history of China during these years, which I found useful for putting Trotsky's writings in context.

Also recommended: The Chinese Communist Party in Power, by Peng Shu-tse; The History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky; and Capitalism's World Disorder, by Jack Barnes.