Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It

By: Leon Trotsky

Narrated by: Darnel Stone

Writing in the heat of struggle against the rise of fascism in Germany, France, and Spain in the 1930s, communist leader Leon Trotsky examines the class origins and character of fascist movements. Building on foundations laid by the Communist International in Lenin's time, Trotsky advances a working-class strategy to combat and defeat this malignant danger.

Public Domain (P)2020 Historical Recordings

Poor presentation

Trotsky's observations and account are interesting and prescient. However, the presentation here is terrible. The pronunciation is ridiculous, and the phrasing is obviously rushed (with the speaker taking breaths in awkward parts of sentences). There are even obvious mistakes that were supposed to clipped out left at the end of the recording. Didn't pay much for it, so I guess I can't be disappointed, but it was not enjoyable to listen to. I'll need to revisit this text elsewhere.

Good book

How to fight the new American fascist!
These words are sage and if people listen we can fight the Fascism coming from the republican party.

Exciting Performance / Important Book

Charismatic reader that speaks passionately, enunciates well and speaks briskly. There was a couple times he stuttered but a lot of these old books are read by people that lack energy to make it compelling but, that was not the case for Darnel Stone. The performance combined with the seriousness of the subject go together beautifully.

Great book, terrible performance.

The book itself was great but the performance was miserable. The reader constantly mispronounces and in the last chapter they left several cuts and typos in. if you have any other option for recordings, go with that.

Narrator Betrayed

Listen, Trotsky is dense as that's basically what you sign up for as a reader. Unfortunately I don't think the poor guy hired for this job was sufficiently prepared by the producers for all the names and terminology to be expected in such a book, the basic expectation for those people, and there were certain mistakes made that were quite glaring (if sometimes hilarious, e.g. "petty" bourgeoisie). The truly unforgivable thing, to me, is that the recording of last five minutes or so WASN'T EVEN EDITED and included the narrator's claps after an error so the editor knew where to break for the fresh, corrected segment. The guy's just doing his job! The production team really failed him and I hope he finds better work