Reflections on a Ravaged Century. by Conquest, Robert - 2000

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, (2000). First Edition, stated. Octavo, gray boards (hardcover), gilt letters, xv, 317 pp. Fine, in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: Robert Conquest is an historian of rare courage and insight. Respected by the left, esteemed by the right, he is graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since George Orwell. He was one of a handful of intellectuals to warn against the grave dangers posed by Stalinism. His previous works, among them The Harvest of Sorrow and The Great Terror, are classics. With Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Conquest presents a brilliant work of history and meditation, one that examines the rogue ideologies that have corrupted our century and, in the process, sent millions to the slaughterhouse. The main responsibility for our century’s cataclysms, Conquest maintains, lies not so much in impersonal economic and social forces as in the huge mental distortions produced by ideologies like revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Whether discussing Kierkegaard, Koestler, or Kosovo, Conquest has the remarkable ability, not unlike Isaiah Berlin, to fuse literature and history, philosophy and prognostication. Here he presents a grand synthesis of our century, as seen through its most deeply flawed ideologies.