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serving my time
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 16, 2024
Pleasant and interesting autobiography, yeah it may come off boastful at times but when you’re Harry Pollitt you’ve earned a right to boast! My only minor criticism is there are a few chunks dedicated to long quotations which, whilst interesting, could be omitted or truncated to allow for more of Pollitt’s own writings.
September 13, 2024
A wonderful autobiography of one of the greatest leaders the British working class has ever known. I have also read Maurice Thorez's, Pollitt's French counterpart, autobiography - the English edition of which Pollitt wrote the introduction for, as a matter of fact - and both books have certainly inspired a certain emotion in me as a communist. After completing both, I feel as though I knew these outstanding figures personally. Reading this book, and the same is true of Thorez's, I felt, in the early chapters dealing with the author's youth especially, a great sense of relating, as though I were hearing an account from a dear friend who I had known for many years or a long lost sibling of mine.
I do not exaggerate, as someone coming from a poor working-class family myself, the relatability felt reading this. And where Thorez's autobiography felt more of a generalised summary of the author's life with only a handful of stories cherrypicked for the reader's consumption, still being excellent in its own way, Pollitt's Serving My Time is full of detailed stories from the author's memory with many long excerpts from speeches and articles by the author added to supplement this. Reading Serving My Time, the reader really gets a feel for the conditions of the working class in the early 20th century and a thorough sketch of the character a true communist ought to embody from a tried and true working-class leader.
Overall, an excellent book that I'd highly recommend accompanied by Thorez's autobiography if possible. My only criticism is that at some points, the supplemented excerpts from the author's speeches and articles can drag on in some areas, especially in one of the final chapters where these excerpts go on for close to ten pages. Nevertheless, a brilliant book for anyone who wants to understand the character of an honest and true communist or the history of the British working-class movement in the first half of the 20th century.
I do not exaggerate, as someone coming from a poor working-class family myself, the relatability felt reading this. And where Thorez's autobiography felt more of a generalised summary of the author's life with only a handful of stories cherrypicked for the reader's consumption, still being excellent in its own way, Pollitt's Serving My Time is full of detailed stories from the author's memory with many long excerpts from speeches and articles by the author added to supplement this. Reading Serving My Time, the reader really gets a feel for the conditions of the working class in the early 20th century and a thorough sketch of the character a true communist ought to embody from a tried and true working-class leader.
Overall, an excellent book that I'd highly recommend accompanied by Thorez's autobiography if possible. My only criticism is that at some points, the supplemented excerpts from the author's speeches and articles can drag on in some areas, especially in one of the final chapters where these excerpts go on for close to ten pages. Nevertheless, a brilliant book for anyone who wants to understand the character of an honest and true communist or the history of the British working-class movement in the first half of the 20th century.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews