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I didn't get through more than 11 chapters of this book (14%) because as cool as the concept is... It's boring. This book is boring. I read some other reviews and they indicate that it never picks up, so I'm putting it down.

If you like reading endless exposition and really pretentious (and yet forgettable) characters then this book might be up your alley, but if you want things to happen then give this one a pass.

The ending wasn't entirely a surprise by the time I got there, but I can't say I enjoy reading about psychotic people killing themselves, or psychosis being used as horror story material. I still have lots of questions, but the ending makes me too uncomfortable to think about the possible answers.

Won't say it's a bad book, but I wish I hadn't read it.

Had to put this one down, not a fan of "they were coerced / forced into having sex and I'm gonna write a whole sex scene about it"

This was a pretty good book, I'd give it 5 stars but the conversation about how it's okay to be trans was patronizing and cringey and forced. Coulda had more than one trans character instead of having a cis character ramble about her trans aunt. It was cool to have a trans character whose story didn't revolve around being trans, though.

This book is an amazing look at the life of a dedicated Marxist Leninist who fought pretty much his whole life for black liberation.

Not only that, but it's an amazing perspective on the history of the CPUSA and its role in worker's rights and black liberation through the years, the good and the bad.

If you already agree with the concept of materialist dialectics then this starts off strong and immediately plateaus. It's more an argument in favor of using materialist dialectics than it is an explanation of the concept. There are definitely better introductions to DiaMat than this, although with almost a century of development of Marxism I'd hope so.