Moxie's review of Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin
Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin (NABAT) by Jan Valtin
As the newest addition to AK Press's Nabat series, I suspected that this would be an interesting book. In fact, it is an absolutely amazing account of the world political scene in the 1920s and 1930s, in the form of a memoir of an organizer in the German Communist Party. At heart, though, the book is an act of revenge; an attempt to expose the Communist Party for its betrayal of the author and all of those who sacrificed themselves for the benefit of The Cause. It is also one of the most incredible adventure stories that I have ever read, detailing one man's quixotic attempt to do anything possible for the advancement of the Comunist Party while living with the mantra "there's nothing a Bolshevik can't do."
This book is an excellent example of how powerful narrative history can be. It is much more compelling than abstract overviews of how many people Stalin murdered or how the Communist Party operated. Reading about how these things intersect with Jan Valtin in the cont...more
This book is an excellent example of how powerful narrative history can be. It is much more compelling than abstract overviews of how many people Stalin murdered or how the Communist Party operated. Reading about how these things intersect with Jan Valtin in the cont...more
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