John Reed 
Ten Days That Shook the World 

The classic account of the Russian Revolution by an American journalist who witnessed it firsthand.   John Reed, an American writer for a socialist magazine, was in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 and Russia began its transformation into the Soviet Union. Read by Lenin himself and adapted into a film by Sergei Eisenstein, Reed’s eyewitness account is a masterpiece of twentieth-century reporting.   Acknowledged by the author as a sympathetic portrait of the revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World was nevertheless praised by the decidedly non-Communist historian George Kennan for its “literary power [and] command of detail”—and banned by none other than Stalin. It remains a riveting and remarkable record of this world-altering event, vividly capturing the words and deeds of both leaders and ordinary people in a moment of radical change.