Product Description

In this stunning book, the first comprehensive biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Francis Wheen gives us not a socialist ogre but a fascinating, ultimately humane man, while still examining the criticisms of his detractors. A study in contradictions, Karl Marx was at once a reserved scholar, a fiery agitator, and a gregarious socialite, while his intellect and ideology were once described as "Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hegel fused into one person." He lived both at the center and on the fringes of his age, and his oratory and writing continue to change the contemporary world. In his entertaining, offbeat style, Wheen offers an eminently readable biography of one of history's most unforgettable figures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #595630 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.com Review
Karl Marx, whose influence on modern times has been compared to that of Jesus Christ, spent most of his lifetime in obscurity. Penniless, exiled in London, estranged from relations, and on the run from most of the police forces of Europe, his ambitions as a revolutionary were frequently thwarted, and his major writings on politics and economics remained unpublished (in some cases until after the Second World War). He has not lacked biographers, but even the most distinguished have been more interested in the evolution of his ideas than any other aspect of his life. Francis Wheen's fresh, lively, and moving biography of Marx considers the whole man--brain, beard, and the rest of his body. Unencumbered by ideological point scoring, this is a very readable, humorous, and sympathetic account. Wheen has an ear for juicy gossip and an eye for original detail. Marx comes across as a hell-raising bohemian, an intellectual bully, and a perceptive critic of capitalist chaos, but also a family man of Victorian conformity (personally vetting his daughters' suitors), Victorian ailments (carbuncles above all), and Victorian weaknesses (notably alcohol, tobacco, and, on occasion, his housekeeper). But there is great pathos, too, as Marx witnessed the deaths of four of his six children. For those readers who feel Marxism has given Marx a bad name, this is a rewarding and enlightening book. --Miles Taylor, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
"It is time to strip away the mythology," writes Wheen, "and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man." In the first major biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Wheen does just that as he looks for the man lurking behind the myths of both enemies and disciples, the misinterpretations and the academic jargon. What he finds is somebody who will suit nobody's purposes--Marx, Wheen argues, lived his life messily. He was neither a clearheaded revolutionary nor an unrepentant hypocrite, but he wasn't the anti-Christ either. More or less incapable of holding down a steady, salaried job, he mooched off of his selfless wife, Jenny (an aristocrat fallen on hard times), and his well-to-do ideological partner, Friedrich Engels, and spent his time obsessively writing unreadable, unmarketable economics tracts. He also spent a good deal of time preaching the imminent revolution of the masses (with whom he appears to have had little affinity). Following Marx from his childhood in Trier, Germany, through his exile in London, Wheen, a columnist for the British Guardian, takes readers from hovel to grand house, from the International Working Man's Association to Capital, from obscurity to notoriety and back again. (Only 11 mourners attended Marx's funeral.) The narrative veers unsteadily from scorn to admiration for the bearded philosopher. Wheen begins by jeering at Marx's cantakerousness and ends by lauding him as a prophet and a brave survivor of poverty and exile. In the end, Wheen's breezy, colorful portrayal is as eccentric as its subject. 16 pages of illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Little about Marx was left undiscovered by David McLellan's highly regarded Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (LJ 3/1/74), 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 nonrelationship with Marx, but otherwise his book is notable less for the quality of the scholarshipDwhich is solid enoughDthan for his deft portraiture. Wheen's Marx is often charming and likableDand 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 meansDmostly 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.DScott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Karl Marx - the first biography to describe the person
This is the first book to describe Marx as a person, a father, husband, friend and individual. Previous books have focused on his theories and/or philosophy. Thus they describe him as a genius or a devil depending on the author's political persausion. Well worth reading. Full of humour, and interesting anecdotes. Marx comes across as being very much more a man than a monster!

Excellent view of a human Marx, but partisan.
This is a highly-readable account of the life of a genuinely unpleasant and selfish man who changed the world. I have read several biographies of Marx, as well as wading through Das Kapital in the original, but none has done such a fine job of bringing the man himself to life. Wheen's research is excellent, and his prose, though sometimes just a bit too colloquial, is refreshingly cant free and smooth. I would gladly have given this entertaining (isn't it remarkable that a book about Marx can be called "entertaining?") book five stars, but the author has one flaw that ultimately becomes laughable. After repeatedly reporting what a noxious beast and vicious betrayer of friends and human trust Marx was his entire adult life, Wheen invariably hastens to excuse Marx and assure us that he was actually a lovely, pleasant, hearty, generous prankster of a fellow. The author has been seduced by his subject, and Marx, who did much wrong, can do no wrong for Wheen. All others are disparaged with relish (poor old Bakunin gets even worse than he deserves, and every other Socialist, anarchist, would-be Communist--even Engels--must be tramped down so Marx the noble soul can be elevated). Well, too much complaint. This is a good and useful book, taken with a few dozen grains of salt. And Francis Wheen did bring the selfish old self-centered huckster to life, while providing a sort of Marx For Dummies explanation of what the man wrote. Paradoxically, this book works best for someone who has already been through a good bit of Marx, and who also enjoys some familiarity of with the work and lives of his contemporaries--that way the text adds to one's knowledge while allowing for a bit of discrimination when Wheen starts gushing about Marx's underlying goodness. Reading carefully, one gets a fine picture of the man; reading without wit or context, the portrait of Marx becomes whoppingly distorted.

The Future of the year 1848
This is a rambunctious and vivid portrait of Marx the man, too often Marx the myth, as an extended snapshot of the individuality of his achievement, no force of history, a man. There is something awesome in the challenge of two men, Marx and Engels, to the unfolding of the capitalist juggernaut in its steamroller immensity of industrial transformation, imperialism and violence, as the disappointment and disillusion of the hopes of the French revolution turn into the malformation of the liberal modernist age. What is to be done? Can such a vast system change course, is there a fix, can anyone be heard in the din of social mechanization? It is testimony to some weakness in the all-powerful system, that a great underswell rose from these men to tidal wave proportions. There is something more than brilliant in Marx's downfield razzledazzle through the ruins of the Hegelian system, encountering the world of Ricardo, to conceive a universal history in this hybrid of material and ideal concepts. The meaning of democracy is in the balance in the rushing years before 1848, after which the quaint hope universal suffrage might create a socialism by the vote of workers is met with the rigged plebiscite dictatorship of the last of the phantom Napoleons, in the litany of cooptations that greet all efforts to make the triad of liberty, fraternity, and equality more than a slogan. Cf, also, Isaiah Berlin's Karl Marx, and Jerold Seigel's Marx's Fate.