I would have just added a comment under the current weeks general thread. If it weren’t for the fact that I really like the book and REALLY think you should read it.
Strong writes in a way that is easy to read. And, as she has done before, she writes about the successes of the Soviet Union and Socialism. My liberal brain-worms were writhing, chapter by chapter they could not accept what was written, too good to be true, propaganda! Though I must have gotten very happy reading about these success, because I at one point got teary-eyed.
quote from where it boiled over.
When a winter childbirth in a distant Arctic station developed complications, the neighbors got the Dixon Island surgeon on the radio and for more than three hours he directed over the air every detail while the whole of a much-worried Arctic listened in. When the child and mother were safe, congratulations poured in from thousands of miles of icebound waterfront.
Please read it, not because I made an epub (although yea, also that), but because I think it’s a great book.
Download my EPUB version: https://comlib.encryptionin.space (or https://archive.org/details/this-soviet-world-anna-louise-strong)
yooooo I love this book! So much so I scanned it as a PDF and uploaded it to libgen hahaha. Having an EPUB is sick too!
But yeah, this book made me feel so many different emotions, I had to put it down nearly every chapter. So much joy, awe, and inspiration, contrasted with so much anger and sadness that we (the west) destroyed this beautiful project. Strong is such an approachable writer and I appreciate her perspective a lot. This book really opened my eyes.
One of her other books (although it’s not that long) The Stalin Era is also really good, and interesting as a historical perspective. She wrote it in the aftermath of the SecretReportSpeech, and while most of that is debunked now, it’s interesting to see how pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin people dealt with the “revelations” at the time. Hahahah I could go on and on and on, but again, thank you for doing this and spreading the word of this book. It’s absolutely one of my favorites!OMG! That’s the source PDF for the EPUB!
the Secret Report, and while most of that is debunked now
What’s the Secret Report and what debunked it? Is this like a translation thing with what in English is usually called Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”?
Yes it’s the “secret speech”. It has been debunked by several people but my favorite is Domenico Losurdo’s “stalin the history and critique of a black legend”. It is a very unique book, it only uses anti-communists sources to contradict the narratives lol.
lmao it’s less a translation thing and more of an “exams week has me exhausted” thing. Thanks for the catch!
youre doing a much needed work
Thanks! This is also hard work. I crammed… I guesstimated 1 hour per chap. yesterday, so somewhere along ~16 hours in these three last days.
It’s great because I also get to read these things. I have some difficulty with sitting down and reading stuff (I have only read 3 of the 5 in crits beginner list + what’s on my website… yea, in ~7-8 months.), so this helps.
Welp, on to the next book! (whatever that’s gonna be, not sure, if you want something you might just get it.) I’ll start on it, then [ADD] on it for a month or two before cramming it in a few days, just as I have done the last three books.
id love historical and dialectical materialism by stalin, its pretty short too. also a must read.
Alright!
…
FUCK. Marx2maos copy counts each footnote by page. Who does that???
Very cool project! How do you go about making (I assume) a PDF into an EPUB?
Calibre. You can actually download this book and add it to calibre, then click edit book to see what I’ve done with it.
If you already know how to do HTML+CSS, you are going to have an easier time.
But it goes something like: Find book, search for it on annas-archive to find the best/cleanest copy I can, run that through OCR (I use OCRMyPDF, just because it’s easy, but it doesn’t have to be it, just anything that will output a TXT file), create a new book in calibre and add an empty EPUB, open that EPUB and add the “ComLib standard [CSS] imports” (see This Soviet World), then just copy from OCR into EPUB, read through it (with the PDF open on another screen) while adding HTML+CSS and re-writing anything that isn’t quite correct.
If you need help with anything, do ping me! If you finish one, do send it over to me so I can upload it on ComLib!
Awesome, ty! I won’t promise I’ll pick it up just yet, but if I do, I will definitely send you any of my conversions. Have been listening to your EPUB using text-to-speech while reading along and it’s much easier to stay engaged. Enjoying the book so far!
Awesome.
Two things I think could be helpfull: Adding a new book in calibre is done in the drop down (small arrow) next to Add Books, you can also add an empty epub there.
EPUBs are XHTML, so HTML 4 and … CSS 2? Essentally keep any HTML and CSS simple. I tried to use grid once, that worked in calibre, but once I opened it in koreader, it was borked.
Not OP, one way is calibre.
Great, I have this but haven’t really used it yet. Will look into how to do these conversions, thanks!
You should upload it to libgen too!
This book is beautiful! Thanks for the hard work cleaning up the epub!
Thank you!!! Its been so hard to find good epubs of Anna Louise Strong’s work.
- . At some point I might work on some of Strong’s other works.
