Summary: "The Anti-Humans: Student Re-education in Romanian Prisons" takes place in Romania short after the Communists came into power with the help from the Soviet Union. But the book is much more than a record of the horrible crimes committed against the Romanian people during this time. It is a warning; it is a voice from beyond the grave, from the living dead behind the Iron Curtain. The book was smuggled out of through the Iron Curtain and translated from Romanian into English. The readers will have at their disposal a complete account of the dehumanization through imprisonment and torture of many of Romania's citizens by the communist regime. The people selected by the authorities for dehumanization were part of a cleverly defined group, university students. This was because in Romania, university students were considered a highly respected elite, including youth who combined vigor with unsurpassed patriotism and a lucid rigor, both intellectually and spiritually. In a time were the communism once again are growing stronger, not least among younger people, which do not know much about the Cold War, and even less regarding the tragedies that took place behind the Iron Curtain, the publishing of The Anti-Humans is filling an important function.

Summary: Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience―in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards. As the death toll mounts―as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on―the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

Summary: The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

Summary: The Sophists assesses the contribution of individuals like Protagoras, Gorgias and Hippias to the extraordinary intellectual and moral fermant in fifth-century Athens. They questioned the bases of morality, religion and organized society itself and the nature of knowledge and language; they initiated a whole series of important and continuing debates, and they provoked Socrates and Plato to a major restatement and defence of traditional values.