Karl Marx

by Wheen, Francis

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Full title :Karl Marx / Francis Wheen.

Summary

Little about Marx was left undiscovered by David McLellan's highly regarded Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, but left-leaning British journalist Wheen attempts to add some new understanding. Wheen does correct a small error that McLellan advanced about Charles Darwin's non-relationship with Marx, but otherwise his book is notable less for the quality of the scholarship--which is solid enough than for his deft portraiture. Wheen's Marx is often charming and likable--and just as often not. An earlier generation of biographers depicted an impoverished Marx dependent upon the generosity of collaborator Frederick Engels, but Wheen demonstrates that Marx actually led a bourgeois lifestyle beyond his means--mostly for the sake of his daughters, whom he adored. Engels seemed to regard Marx almost as a fortunate younger sibling would a brilliant but unlucky older brother. Wheen's book is engagingly written, but his editors have done him a disservice by retaining an overabundance of British colloquialisms that simply do not travel well across the pond. Still, Wheen's compelling depiction of the truly historic Marx-Engels friendship combines with a bold prose style to commend his book to serious academic and public libraries--Library Journal.