Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics - including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome - as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.
"Aims to rescue Lenin from both liberal caricature and Soviet hagiography by recovering the realism and dynamism of his political thought * New Republic [for Dilemmas of Lenin] * Ali encourages the reader to take a fresh look at Lenin's choices in the context of a repressive autocracy, the poverty and misery of the bulk of the population under tsarism and the industrialised slaughter of the first world war. What underpins his book is the view that October was an ""innocent and utopian birth"" that was subsequently ""twisted"" into Stalinism by three devastating years of civil war. * Guardian [for Dilemmas of Lenin] * An incredibly powerful, panoramic, and insightful study of the central revolutionary figure of the twentieth century . The Dilemmas of Lenin helps attentive readers comprehend something of what happened in history, the realities of our time, and how the future could unfold if we approach it with understanding and commitment. * International Socialist Review [for Dilemmas of Lenin] *"