I approached this book as an introduction to a period I don't know well enough and wasn't too concerned about the degree of scholarliness displayed. By the time I was done I'm quite sure that I would not recommend Read's narrative as a useful introduction, though he does seem quite sincere about providing a survey of the initial influence of the Bolshevik revolution on the Western world. However, as we all know, sincerity is not enough and I'm wondering what the point of this exercise all was. At the very least there is little attempt to explain that many of the social conflicts of 1919 were simply matters of old business that were being taken up again in the wake of the war, if only in a more virulent form, and would have arisen even without the emergence of the Leninists. I suppose that would mean that the author would have to express a theory of history, or at least social conflict, but you're not going to find that here. Maybe the author would have been better off writing a more focused book about World War I as a systemic shock making societies susceptible to panic, rather than simply writing about how the Bolshevik revolutionary was used as a bogeyman; again that would require Read to display a better sense of context. ( )