Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much passion, controversy, and curiosity as Leon Trotsky. His role in history—his epic rise and fall, his fiery persona, his violent end in Mexico in August 1940—holds a fascination that transcends the history of the Russian Revolution. Bertrand M. Patenaude masterfully interweaves the story of Trotsky’s final years with flashbacks to pivotal episodes in his career as a young Marxist, revolutionary hero, Red Army chief, Bolshevik leader, outcast from Stalin’s USSR, and ultimately heretic of the Kremlin, targeted for assassination by its secret police. Gripping, tragic, and based on extensive firsthand research, Trotsky brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history’s most captivating and important figures.
Bertrand M. Patenaude is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He is the author of The Big Show in Bololand, which won the Marshall Shulman Book Prize. He lives in Menlo Park, California.
“Bertrand Patenaude tells a masterly story, of a brilliant, cornered man and, along the way, of a misguided century.”
-The Wall Street Journal
“Bertrand Patenaude’s Trotsky is an epic character: fiery, vain, contentious, exacting, intellectually lively, ideologically blinded, seductive, even sexually aggressive—and a man keenly aware that the inherent tragedy behind human existence overshadows the petty mishaps of politics, assassination included.”
-—Ken Kalfus
“This is an extraordinary, gripping piece of history that gets closer to Trotsky’s essential character than any of the vast tomes devoted to him in the past. Perhaps most extraordinary is the page-turning narrative drive which keeps the reader enthralled despite knowing how the story ends. Don’t miss it.”
-—Misha Glenny
“It is a tribute to Bertrand Patenaude’s narrative skill that although we always know how his book is going to end, it is none the less readable and utterly gripping. . . . The pace and tension are worthy of a Hollywood thriller.”
-Dominic Sandbrook, The Daily Telegraph
“Well researched and vividly told.”
-Robert Service, The Guardian
“Excellent, exciting. . . . Trotsky charts, with novelistic flair and in archival detail, the progress of the plot that culminated in Trotsky being killed with an ice axe in 1940.”
-Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Sunday Telegraph
“An absorbing reconstruction of Trotsky’s last years in Mexico. . . . Patenaude’s hyrbrid history and detective story grips from start to finish. With rare narrative verve, he chronicles the last years of a revolutionary’s life, with its sexual jealousies, paranoia, and finally murder.”
-Ian Thomson, The Sunday Times
“This book deepens and enhances the sense of tragedy that always attends contemplation of ‘the Old Man’ and his last struggle.”
-Christopher Hitchens
“Fascinating. . . . A masterly account. . . . Patenaude applies his expert knowledge of early Soviet history in narrating the story of Leon Trotsky’s final years in exile in Mexico.”
-Library Journal
“A captivating account. . . . Patenaude paints a vivid portrait of Trotsky, a flamboyant, Westernized intellectual. . . . This is a dramatic, event-filled portrait of a turbulent, half– forgotten era.”
-—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A haunting and dramatic reconstruction of Trotsky’s life and death in exile. The detail is fascinating, almost voyeuristic.”
-Richard Overy, Literary Review
“Gripping. . . . Patenaude has created both a compelling biography of the revolutionary leader and a thrilling account of the violent world of international socialist politics in the 1930s.”
-The Financial Times
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