(Little, Brown, $35)
If Karl Marx were alive today, he’d be as scandalous as John Edwards or Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Elaine Showalter in The Washington Post. In 1850, Marx’s wife, Jenny, was pregnant with their fourth child and away raising money for her husband’s work when Marx slept with their housekeeper and impregnated her. The secret was kept by his ally Friedrich Engels, who claimed paternity of his friend’s illegitimate son. Mary Gabriel’s riveting new biography of Marx teems with lurid details about the economic theorist. Apparently, Marx’s “love for the working man knew no bounds, but his own family suffered from his readiness to sacrifice their needs to the Cause.” It’s “hard to imagine that a weighty book on Karl Marx could be a page-turner, but this one is.”
A book about Marx could be a tough sell, said Michael Washburn in The Boston Globe. With global communism on the ropes, and with Marx widely considered the “enemy of all that is good and true and American,” he seems a poor choice of subject. Yet Gabriel’s biography overcomes those obstacles. The father of communism, it turns out, was “a lout with money and a scoundrel to his family.” For all his waxing about capital, Marx was never economically self-sufficient, relying on Engels, his benefactor, to pay him a salary from the profits generated by the Engels family’s capitalist factories.
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Karl may have been the hero of the proletariat, but Jenny is this book’s heroine, said Simon Sebag Montefiore in The New York Times. Her husband’s intellectual equal, she remained faithful despite his “mountainous selfishness and self-regard.” Yet for all his flaws, Marx comes across here as irresistibly charismatic, capable of winning over both family members and legions of loyal socialist followers. Despite a rocky start and fits of purple prose, Gabriel’s book provides an entertaining view of Marx, “enjoyable not so much because of any brisk analysis of Marxist theory that it provides” but because it’s a “vivid portrait of a struggling, obsessional bohemian intellectual.”
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