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Downfall of a Revolutionary
by Bertrand M. Patenaude
In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most famous yet elusive figures.
"Starred Review. 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
"A haunting and dramatic reconstruction of Trotsky's life and death in exile. The detail is fascinating, almost voyeuristic." - 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
"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 jealousises, paranoia, and finally murder." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"Well researched and vividly told." - The Guardian (UK)
"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." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
This information about Trotsky was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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