I figured I should read this if I was going to review the film Reds, which is essentially a biopic of Joh Reed, for my Patreon. My main takeaway is that the film version is essentially the opposite of this: while the movie glosses over the nitty-gritty of the politics in favor of the aesthetics of revolution, the book is extremely dense with factual reporting with virtually no focus on crafting narrative. 

And for the most part that's just good journalism. This certainly earns its status as the definitive English-language account of the revolution. While it is clear that Reed is firmly supportive of the Bolsheviks, he does not editorialize. He presents accounts of critiques of the Bolsheviks and of their enemies as he has heard them, not in his own words. Sometimes this leads to confusion where factions are hard to keep track of as they all accuse each other of betraying the will of the people and selling out the revolution, but I appreciate the objectivity. I could nitpick at the framing but Reed undeniably knows more than I do, though he does stumble at times into some casual racism and misogyny. 

The refreshing thing about this book -- as is the case with most of the movie -- is that it allows for there to be ambiguity about what is right and good, but from firmly within what Americans would call "the left." Politics are so often boiled down to the point where any lack of cohesion within leftist groups is seen as infighting, so it's nice to have things parsed out in detail in a context that holds "the owning class are parasites who must be overthrown by force" as a universal truth, and respects the need for more detail to develop from there. 

Not gonna lie, Warren Beatty really fumbled when he made the movie about Reed's like focus for 3/4 on a stupid love triangle and barely show the revolution at all.