It All Started With Marx: An Irreverent History of Communism

In this safari into satire and the wilds of the half truth and the truth and a half, Armour romps through Communism from beginning to end, or as near the end as it was at the time of writing. With prize specimens like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Khrushchev to operate on, Doctor Armour dissects the Comrades with glee and a sharp pen. There are laughs aplenty as Armour, proving that the pun is mightier than the sword, makes capital of Das Kapital, describes the orgies of the Orgburo, and leads his happy fans through revolutions, counterrevolutions, and counter counterrevolutions. For extra fun, he makes a few uninhibited explorations into the communist world of atheism and free love. Although Richard Armour is best known to the public as a humorist, his remarkably varied career has a serious side as well: a PhD from Harvard, Professor of English at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School in California, with eighteen books to his credit including a number of scholarly works, some 4,000 published poems, and hundreds of articles and reviews in more than eighty magazines in England and America.