Richard Pipes was a b_b recommendation and I thank him every chance I get. He was an old-school Reaganite hawk and this book, in particular, is written for tenth graders. It covers "how fucked were the Bolsheviks after the revolution" "how blind were American boosters of Communism" "How much of a catastrophe was Soviet central planning" and "how much of a humanitarian crisis rule by the nomenklatura caused" while using historical and sociological research to point out that communism as advanced by everyone that has tried it runs afoul of basic human wants and needs. He spends a little time early on basically calling bullshit on marxism in general and then goes out of his way to point out that Marxism-Leninism ain't "communism" and that which was practiced in China and the Soviet Union are a far cry from what Marx had in mind anyway. You gotta keep in mind - Che is not a communist, not as far as that goes, anyway. He's a face on a t-shirt. 