Karl Marx

"Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life is the first major biography since the end of the Cold War of the father of Communism. While previous biographers have suffered from an inability to view Marx and his work apart from the regimes spawned in his name, Wheen gives us not a mythical socialist ogre but a fascinating, maddening, ultimately humane man.".

"Paradox and passion were the animating spirits of Marx's life. A Prussian emigre who would become the picture of a middle-class English gentleman, a fiery agitator who spent most of his time in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room, a gregarious host who eventually alienated all but one or two friends, Marx had a sweeping, stormy existence that resembled nothing so much as a novel by Laurence Sterne or George Eliot.". "Wheen also illuminates the foggiest questions surrounding Marx's work: Was he, as his detractors have claimed, a self-hating Jew? What did Marx really mean by his famous remark "Religion is the opiate of the masses"? Were the prophecies of The Communist Manifesto mistaken? Does Capital, Marx's masterwork, deserve the ridicule with which modern-day economists have dismissed it?". "The triumph of Karl Marx is its indelible portrait of the man himself. Marx's lifelong marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, "the most beautiful girl in Trier" and daughter of a redoubtable baron, whose devotion to her husband was tested by decades of poverty and exile, is as affecting a love story as history offers. Even more arresting is Wheen's reconstruction of what is perhaps the most inspiring friendship of the nineteenth century. Friedrich Engels was the heir of the lucrative textile firm Ermen & Engels, an invincibly bourgeois man whose taste for women and fox-hunting knew no bounds. Yet it was Engels who first enlightened Marx on the contradictions of capitalism, and who would later finance him (often with money pilfered from the family strongbox), ghostwrite many of Marx's journalistic pieces, and serv