There were only 11 mourners at Karl Marx's funeral in Highgate cemetery on March 17th 1883, but within a hundred years of his death governments that professed Marxism as their guiding faith ruled half the world's population. "Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion - or so been so calamitously misinterpreted."(p.1) It is easy to forget that Marx was also human. Neither his enemies nor his disciples have been willing to admit as much: in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin he was declared a saint, while the West demonized him as the father of all evil. In Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life he presents Marx as an intricate and vulnerable figure, a Prussian refugee who, in Wheen's words, "became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes." He was a prodigal son to whom his mother said, "I wish you would make some capital instead of just wr

The target audience for Wheen's biography would probably be for 40+ age demographic. Wheen does not seem to have any shockingly new information about Marx so his book would not be steered to Marxists. Wheen basically tried to give an insight to Marx that had not been written about yet: Marx as a human being. Karl Marx: A Life was not a terribly difficult read, it was rather dull as it was repetitive. Marx was constantly begging for money from Engels, distant relatives, or whomever else would help him out, and Wheen, for some reason (maybe to show off his research), felt it necessary to make an account of exactly how much money he received and when. The constant bombardment of numbers lost its effect very quickly and the reader can lose interest rapidly as well. Since it was a biography, Wheen could only pick and choose where his personal insight could be the most effective. This did not hurt the overall impact of the book, but it did not help it either. To make the biography more interesting Wheen could have discussed his views more frequently.

iting about it." The permanently impoverished pamphleteer was inordinately proud of his wife's aristocratic background, the father grieving bitterly over the loss of his child, the player of the stock market forever plagued by boils on the bum and tension headaches that paralyzed him for days. Unlike the legion of biographers who have dealt primarily with Marxist economic theory, it is Wheen's goal to avoid another lengthy volume on class struggle, dialectical materialism and the triumph of the proletariat. Instead, the author is drawn to the more human aspect of the father of Communism in an attempt to demolish the myths that obscure the man behind the theories. Wheen does, however, acknowledge Marx's lifelong assault on capitalism through his chapters on The Communist Manifesto, arguably one of the most influential political pamphlets ever published, and on the monumental undertaking that would eventually lead to Das Kapital.

Another weakness in the book was the reader could find it difficult to get a grasp on what time period Wheen is in. In one paragraph Wheen could be discussing one of Marx's theories and then in the next sentence Wheen would try to give his analysis on the theory. Only when he uses an example of something modern, such as McDonald's, can the reader realize that it is Wheen speaking and not Marx. This error occurred numerous times throughout the novel and was quite a nuisance. But for the most part biography did, as expected, go in chronological order events that happened in his life.

Financially, Karl Marx lived a life of dependence. There is the endless cadging from relatives and friends (from Friedrich Engels especially, who stole petty sums from his family firm to support Marx) that was unaccompanied by any serious attempt on Marx's part to find employment. When he did undertake paid assignments, from the New York Daily Tribune and, later, the American Cyclopaedia, it was Engels often wrote the articles. The Marx family was constantly in debt and hiding from its creditors. All gifts of money that

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Approximate Word count = 2095
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)