A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx

A solid biography that is more a birds-eye survey of Marx’s writings and correspondence than it is an in-depth overview of his life and times, although there are some particularly illuminating sections on Marx’s political involvement in the First International. Liedman goes a little too hard on Marxism after Marx, whose faults he speciously blames solely on Engels. But it’s worth a read to get a sense of how Marx was not a “systems builder,” but a dynamic, critical thinker constantly in search of new ways to understand and unfold the totality of capitalist social relations.