Chris Harman (1942–2009)

I found this book offensive. There is really no other way to put it. It's blatantly one sided, with pointless character assassinations on one side and whitewashing on the other. The author uses a really insulting tactic of quoting other sources as if they were factual on disputed matters giving no background or differing sources or even any disclaimers. A lot of it is childish point scoring and "look how nasty capitalism is".

At the same time though, I found it interesting and I useful to see what the world looks like through the eyes of communism's number one fan. Funny how there are no fans of communism in countries that suffered through it.

Another problem with this book and pretty much any communist is they always compare capitalism in practice with communism in theory which is a pointless comparison. Want to debate which one is better in theory? Fine, but don't use examples from the real world to show how capitalism is broken because then we have to use examples from the real world for communism and that debate you have lost about 50 times over and still losing by such a wide margin it's embarrassing.… (mere)

Well, it's not really
"... a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals."

and it's not at all, really, "a people's history". This book just happens to acknowledge (only occasionally) the populations behind the leaders, and is nothing more than the new historicism - which is great - marketed as "A people's history of X". Many recent history books talk at least as much about the human environment in which events happen.

So he sometimes used Marxist ideas to frame events. There's nothing odd about that: much less odd than talking about "raw economic forces" devoid of actual humans.

Histories of the world are always great, I think. This one was great too - otherwise it wouldn't have got 3 stars.… (mere)