The Prophet Outcast: Life of Trotsky, 1929 to 1940, Vol. 3 Book

After some searching, I've actually been able to find the actual covers of the edition of Isaac Deutscher's three volume biography of Leon Trotsky I read in high school--now reprinted in a single volume. These, his history of the Russian revolution and a collection of his literary essays led me, by age sixteen, to assert in some companies that I was a Trotskyist. Now that seems naive. I really didn't know much of what I was talking about and what I did know was all written from a sympathetic perspective.

Trotsky had the advantage of being exiled before the revolution entirely revolved, revealing a dark underbelly of repression and coercion. Deutscher, definitely a sympathizer who would claim that things would have been much better had Lenin not had his strokes and had Trotsky politically defeated Stalin, to his credit does not paint an entirely positive picture of his subject, most notably in his treatment of Trotsky's behavior as military commander during the time of the Kronstadt mutiny. Still, his biography is as sympathetic as the facts, which he respects, allow.

This criticism notwithstanding, Deutscher's biography of Trotsky is an outstanding piece of work--well researched and well written.