[.ca] Vatican and the Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of ... (ISBN 0225668831)

Unusually valuable survey of recent history:
No review can indicate this survey's range: a range achieved without waste of wood pulp, since at 351 dense pages - including lavish footnote references - the publication is decidedly on the epigrammatic side. Repeatedly our authors compel reassessments of figures we thought we knew. (One example among a dozen: those naïve Anglo-Saxons who still envisage Tomás Masaryk as some sort of cuddly rationalist teddy-bear, Barry-Jones-style, will receive instructive surprises from his vengeful atheistic snarls.) Occasional factual errors disfigure the text. The authors misdate by six years America's diplomatic recognition of the USSR; while Admiral Horthy, here described as Lutheran, was actually (like most Hungarian Protestants) Calvinist. A second edition, though, can repair these mistakes; and a second edition there should certainly be. Of The Vatican and the Red Flag, as of precious little other modern historiography, it can be said: read it, or risk being exposed as forever unfit to discourse upon its subject.