The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century.

BRZEZINSKI, Zbigniew.

Item Number: 128045

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989.

First edition of Brzezinski’s work about the crisis of communism. Octavo, original half cloth. With a typed letter signed by Brzezinski tipped in addressed to William Safire tipped in. The recipient, William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and supported him again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Marek Antoniak.

"This is a book about the terminal crisis of communism. It describes and analyzes the progressive decay and the deepening agony both of the system and of its dogma. It concludes that by the next century communism's irreversible historical decline will have made its practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human condition. Prospering only where it abandons its internal substance even while retaining some of its external labels, communism will be remembered largely as the twentieth century's most extraordinary political and intellectual aberration" (from the Introduction).