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aimeemarie's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.75
anti_christie's review against another edition
4.0
An illuminating work, but not quite as powerful at delivering its message as it should be. I think someone devoid of any knowledge of socialism might leave confused at the aims of the movement. Still, I think this has a lot of merit as a grounding work to educate (or re-educate) about the history of socialism in America and around the world over the past few centuries.
politizer's review against another edition
2.0
The Introduction is excellent, and the penultimate chapter offers many useful lessons. The meat of the book, however -- which is a series of histories of socialist movements and where they went wrong -- was difficult for me to follow. Each chapter offers an important lesson, but it's often hard to follow all the details unless you're already very familiar with the historical moment being described. Each chapter reads kind of like it's taking a period the reader is already familiar with and reframing it to show what we can learn about it as socialists. Incidentally, I felt like I learned the most from the chapter on China, which also happens to be the one about which I already had the most familiarity before. I feel like to get the most out of this book, you need to already be deeply familiar with all the histories Sunkara is describing. For the rest of us, it's just hard to keep track of all the details and how they go together.
mg_1133's review against another edition
5.0
This book was a fantastic primer on socialist systems in history with a mind towards how they could apply to our western societies (namely the U.S. and the U.K.) today. While the title speaks to the book being a guide to implementing socialist policy in the 21st century, most of the content was actually about socialist governments and movements of the past. I really enjoyed that it was more comprehensive as this is an area that I feel I had very little exposure to in my education. I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn at a very basic level the ideas behind those governments and political parties as well as a chance to explore the dysfunctions they experienced and how they each respectively fell apart or out of favor.
billydoubledown's review against another edition
5.0
This book serves as an introduction to sociological theory for me as I'm now more interested in reading Marx, Weber and Dubois. I'm bias in that I enjoy listening to the Jacobin podcast and want Mr. Sunkara's book project to do well.
jordynhaime's review against another edition
2.0
Actually it’s 185 pages of boring oversimplified history and 30 pages of uninspiring ‘manifesto.’ Maybe a good place to start if you’ve never read about socialism before but don’t waste you’re time if you’re looking for something more in depth.