Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It

By: Leon Trotsky

Narrated by: Darnel Stone

Writing in the heat of struggle against the rise of fascism in Germany, France, and Spain in the 1930s, communist leader Leon Trotsky examines the class origins and character of fascist movements. Building on foundations laid by the Communist International in Lenin's time, Trotsky advances a working-class strategy to combat and defeat this malignant danger.

Public Domain (P)2020 Historical Recordings

Poor presentation

Trotsky's observations and account are interesting and prescient. However, the presentation here is terrible. The pronunciation is ridiculous, and the phrasing is obviously rushed (with the speaker taking breaths in awkward parts of sentences). There are even obvious mistakes that were supposed to clipped out left at the end of the recording. Didn't pay much for it, so I guess I can't be disappointed, but it was not enjoyable to listen to. I'll need to revisit this text elsewhere.

Exciting Performance / Important Book

Charismatic reader that speaks passionately, enunciates well and speaks briskly. There was a couple times he stuttered but a lot of these old books are read by people that lack energy to make it compelling but, that was not the case for Darnel Stone. The performance combined with the seriousness of the subject go together beautifully.

Great book, terrible performance.

The book itself was great but the performance was miserable. The reader constantly mispronounces and in the last chapter they left several cuts and typos in. if you have any other option for recordings, go with that.

Good book

How to fight the new American fascist!
These words are sage and if people listen we can fight the Fascism coming from the republican party.

Terrible Reading

Poor presentation of a critical work. The halting narration and mispronunciations is incredibly distracting and made it hard to follow.

Single Worst Reading of My 93 Title Library

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The guy literally gives up on the last chapter. He is in the booth screwing up and just starts clapping out of frustration and reading faster to get through it. Like a kid in high school like he's just blatantly plowing through to get it over with. He gets sick of reading on the audiobook lmao. Audible should pull this honestly, they never should have released it. That isn't where the issues begin either the illiterate can't pronounce a slew of the vocabulary most jarring one for me was 'jacobin.'

Trotsky has some good analysis but you know that already.

Clapping, mispronunciations, inaccuracy

If you accidentally say the wrong word, don’t just keep speaking. If you have to repeat yourself then edit it. There are parts where Darnell Stone claps, I’m sure to mark where he messes up, but they should be fixed to make it easier to listen to.

Story-wise, this is presented as a work by Leon Trotsky (who passed in 1940), but is instead what I can only assume is a Republican propaganda piece using pieces of Trotskys works.

The introduction intentionally revises history or otherwise ignores significant elements that Trotsky brings up in the text itself. It feels as though this were written by someone who thought that these excerpts supported their political narrative but didn’t understand it well enough to realize that it does not.

Was the Narrator Being Tortured by Fascists?

A brilliant and important work made unlistenable by dreadful narration. Comical mispronunciations of relatively common names. Read like a long list of words without consideration of sentence structure - like a small child learning to read. Get the text.