The Romance of American Communism
By: Vivian Gornick
4.34
Format: 278 pages, Paperback
Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to Am…
Want to Read $ 9.99"My father had a sister, Mady, who had married badly and ‘ruined her life.’ Her story was a classic. She had fallen in love before the war with an American adventurer, married him against her family’s wishes, and been disinherited by my grandfather. Mady followed her husband romantically across the sea. In America he promptly abandoned her. By the time my parents arrived in America Mady was already a broken woman, sick and prematurely old, living a life two steps removed from destitution. My father, of course, immediately put her on an allowance and made her welcome in his home. But the iron laws of Victorian transgression had been set in motion and it was really all over for Mady. You know what it meant for a woman to have been so disgraced and disinherited in those years? She had the mark of Cain on her. She would live, barely tolerated, on the edge of respectable society for the rest of her life. A year after we arrived in America, I was eleven years old, a cousin of mine was married out of our house. We lived then in a lovely brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side. The entire house had been cleaned and decorated for the wedding. Everything sparkled and shone, from the basement kitchen to the third-floor bedrooms. In a small room on the second floor the women gathered around the bride, preening, fixing their dresses, distributing bouquets of flowers. I was allowed to be there because I was only a child. There was a bunch of long-stemmed roses lying on the bed, blood-red and beautiful, each rose perfection. Mady walked over to them. I remember the other women were wearing magnificent dresses, embroidered and bejeweled. Mady was wearing only a simple white satin blouse and a long black skirt with no ornamentation whatever. She picked up one of the roses, sniffed deeply at it, held it against her face. Then she walked over to a mirror and held the rose against her white blouse. Immediately, the entire look of her plain costume was altered; the rose transferred its color to Mady’s face, brightening her eyes. Suddenly, she looked lovely, and young again. She found a long needle-like pin and began to pin the rose to her blouse. My mother noticed what Mady was doing and walked over to her. Imperiously, she took the rose out of Mady’s hand and said, ‘No, Mady, those flowers are for the bride.’ Mady hastily said, ‘Oh, of course, I’m sorry, how stupid of me not to have realized that,’ and her face instantly assumed its usual mask of patient obligation. “I experienced in that moment an intensity of pain against which I have measured every subsequent pain of life. My heart ached so for Mady I thought I would perish on the spot. Loneliness broke, wave after wave, over my young head and one word burned in my brain. Over and over again, through my tears, I murmured, ‘Unjust! Unjust!’ I knew that if Mady had been one of the ‘ladies’ of the house my mother would never have taken the rose out of her hand in that manner. The memory of what had happened in the bedroom pierced me repeatedly throughout that whole long day, making me feel ill and wounded each time it returned. Mady’s loneliness became mine. I felt connected, as though by an invisible thread, to her alone of all the people in the house. But the odd thing was I never actually went near her all that day. I wanted to comfort her, let her know that I at least loved her and felt for her. But I couldn’t. In fact, I avoided her. In spite of everything, I felt her to be a pariah, and that my attachment to her made me a pariah, also. It was as though we were floating, two pariahs, through the house, among all those relations, related to no one, not even to each other. It was an extraordinary experience, one I can still taste to this day. I was never again able to address myself directly to Mady’s loneliness until I joined the Communist Party. When I joined the Party the stifled memory of that strange wedding day came back to me. . ."-Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism
"My father had a sister, Mady, who had married badly and ‘ruined her life.’ Her story was a classic. She had fallen in love before the war with an American adventurer, married him against her family’s wishes, and been disinherited by my grandfather. Mady followed her husband romantically across the sea. In America he promptly abandoned her. By the time my parents arrived in America Mady was already a broken woman, sick and prematurely old, living a life two steps removed from destitution. My father, of course, immediately put her on an allowance and made her welcome in his home. But the iron laws of Victorian transgression had been set in motion and it was really all over for Mady. You know what it meant for a woman to have been so disgraced and disinherited in those years? She had the mark of Cain on her. She would live, barely tolerated, on the edge of respectable society for the rest of her life. A year after we arrived in America, I was eleven years old, a cousin of mine was married out of our house. We lived then in a lovely brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side. The entire house had been cleaned and decorated for the wedding. Everything sparkled and shone, from the basement kitchen to the third-floor bedrooms. In a small room on the second floor the women gathered around the bride, preening, fixing their dresses, distributing bouquets of flowers. I was allowed to be there because I was only a child. There was a bunch of long-stemmed roses lying on the bed, blood-red and beautiful, each rose perfection. Mady walked over to them. I remember the other women were wearing magnificent dresses, embroidered and bejeweled. Mady was wearing only a simple white satin blouse and a long black skirt with no ornamentation whatever. She picked up one of the roses, sniffed deeply at it, held it against her face. Then she walked over to a mirror and held the rose against her white blouse. Immediately, the entire look of her plain costume was altered; the rose transferred its color to Mady’s face, brightening her eyes. Suddenly, she looked lovely, and young again. She found a long needle-like pin and began to pin the rose to her blouse. My mother noticed what Mady was doing and walked over to her. Imperiously, she took the rose out of Mady’s hand and said, ‘No, Mady, those flowers are for the bride.’ Mady hastily said, ‘Oh, of course, I’m sorry, how stupid of me not to have realized that,’ and her face instantly assumed its usual mask of patient obligation. “I experienced in that moment an intensity of pain against which I have measured every subsequent pain of life. My heart ached so for Mady I thought I would perish on the spot. Loneliness broke, wave after wave, over my young head and one word burned in my brain. Over and over again, through my tears, I murmured, ‘Unjust! Unjust!’ I knew that if Mady had been one of the ‘ladies’ of the house my mother would never have taken the rose out of her hand in that manner. The memory of what had happened in the bedroom pierced me repeatedly throughout that whole long day, making me feel ill and wounded each time it returned. Mady’s loneliness became mine. I felt connected, as though by an invisible thread, to her alone of all the people in the house. But the odd thing was I never actually went near her all that day. I wanted to comfort her, let her know that I at least loved her and felt for her. But I couldn’t. In fact, I avoided her. In spite of everything, I felt her to be a pariah, and that my attachment to her made me a pariah, also. It was as though we were floating, two pariahs, through the house, among all those relations, related to no one, not even to each other. It was an extraordinary experience, one I can still taste to this day. I was never again able to address myself directly to Mady’s loneliness until I joined the Communist Party. When I joined the Party the stifled memory of that strange wedding day came back to me. . ."-Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism
If you liked the theory plot in The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick , here is a list of 9 books like this:
1. The State and Revolution
By: Vladimir Lenin
4.24
Format: 116 pages, Paperback
1917-ci ilin avqust-sentyabr aylarında yazılan yaradıcı marksizmin bu görkəmli əsəri – “Dövlət və i… read more
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"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!"-Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
"To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, not only in parliamen…"-Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
"We must also note that Engels is most definite in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously summing up the long experience of German Social-De…"-Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
"Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to England, Norway and so forth - in these countries the real business of the 'state' is preformed behind the scenes and is ca…"-Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
2. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
By: Samuel R. Delany
4.18
Format: 203 pages, Paperback
If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely 42nd Street. Between Seven… read more
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"A glib wisdom holds that people like this just don’t want relationships. They have “problems with intimacy."-Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
"In order to dismantle such a discourse we must begin with the realization that desire is never “outside all social constraint."-Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
3. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
By: Tom Wolfe
3.79
Format: None pages, Paperback
The white liberal establishment encounters the newly emerging art of confrontation in two devastati… read more
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4. Das Kapital
By: Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels , Serge L. Levitsky
4.22
Format: None pages, Paperback
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's seminal work, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth centu… read more
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5. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
By: Michael Parenti
4.41
Format: 166 pages, Paperback
Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, rev… read more
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"Ecology's implications for capitalism are too horrendous for the capitalist to contemplate."-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
"Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency-which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution."-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
"A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good."-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
"...the [pure socialist] critics [of communist countries] seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country."-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
6. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
By: C.L.R. James
4.55
Format: 160 pages, Paperback
A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intens… read more
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7. The Octopus: A Story of California
By: Frank Norris , Kevin Starr
5.00
Format: 500 pages, Paperback
Like the tentacles of an octopus, the tracks of the railroad reached out across California, as if t… read more
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8. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
By: Mike Davis
3.33
Format: None pages, Paperback
The hidden story of L.A. Mike Davis shows us where the city's money comes from and who controls it … read more
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9. Coming into the Country
By: John McPhee
4.80
Format: 360 pages,
This is the story of Alaska and the Alaskans. Written with a vividness and clarity which shifts sce… read more
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10. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
By: Ellen Meiksins Wood
3.44
Format: 406 pages, Paperback
Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor is it simply an extensi… read more
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11. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By: Vincent Bevins
4.28
Format: 337 pages, Hardcover
The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world - and what comes next From 20… read more
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"In the history of revolutions, a couple of truisms had already emerged. One is that they are only successful when security forces defect or are defeated in violent conflict. Even if Moa Zedong was be…"-Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
12. The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
By: Vincent Bevins
4.61
Format: 320 pages, Hardcover
The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- ba… read more
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"locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: 'We just don't understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died f…"-Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
13. Parade
By: Rachel Cusk
3.70
Format: 198 pages, Hardcover
From the exhilarating mind of Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, Parade disturbs and defin… read more
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"He knew that [his work] embodied change, and he wasn’t interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind in its storming passage toward the future."-Rachel Cusk, Parade
"Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying socie…"-Rachel Cusk, Parade
"Sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of inanimate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substa…"-Rachel Cusk, Parade
"The impulse to have a child is very often a response to the woman’s own childhood, as though her childhood has left her incomplete, or has taken a part of her that she is driven to find again. The st…"-Rachel Cusk, Parade
14. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
By: Andreas Malm
3.96
Format: 208 pages, Paperback
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appea… read more
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"The context for hope is radical uncertainty; anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it."-Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline
"I once asked Bill McKibben, after an energising speech to a capacity crowd, when – given that the situation is as urgent as he portrayed it and we all know it is – we escalate. He was visibly ill at …"-Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline
15. Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend
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4.39
Format: 353 pages, ebook
La figura di Stalin occupa una posizione centrale nella storia del Novecento. Dittatore sanguinario… read more
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16. The Romance of American Communism
By: Vivian Gornick
4.34
Format: 278 pages, Paperback
Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to Am… read more
Want to Read $ 9.99Similar categories in Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism book and Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism
- american history
- american
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- memoir
- the united states of america
- theory
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- united states
- nonfiction
"My father had a sister, Mady, who had married badly and ‘ruined her life.’ Her story was a classic. She had fallen in love before the war with an American adventurer, married him against her family’s…"-Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism
17. Who's Afraid of Gender?
By: Judith Butler
4.02
Format: 320 pages, Hardcover
From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politi… read more
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"Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if y…"-Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?
18. Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
By: Kōhei Saitō
3.91
Format: 273 pages, Kindle Edition
"[A] well-reasoned and eye-opening treatise . . . [Kohei Saito makes] a provocative and visionary p… read more
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19. The Guest Lecture
By: Martin Riker
3.51
Format: 256 pages, Paperback
In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to he… read more
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20. Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV
By: Emily Nussbaum
4.02
Format: 464 pages, Hardcover
Who invented reality TV, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre, and why can’t we look away f… read more
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21. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
By: John Ganz
4.23
Format: 432 pages, Hardcover
A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era―and their dark legac… read more
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