Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The price of $7.99, happily paid for this Lewis' kindle, is so much cheaper than the heavy price of my first clandestine acquaintance with the same book during the years of my USSR youth in the fifties: it well could be from 5 to 7 years in labor camps, so I was really lucky then to escape this punishment, given for any anti-Soviet reading. Well, Mr. Lewis himself had nothing to do with such an interpretation of the book: he was writing about the threat of fascism, not of socialism. But Stalin's censors were quite shrewd in their understanding that practice of fascist hell in America would look just a bit too familiar for readers in a socialist paradise here. I have no boldness to comment the excellent book itself (it's about the same as to comment Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", which was as clear warning about horrors of Communism for the Russian readers). Unfortunately, neither masterpiece was believed by their respective societies, so the best comments to them are made now not by readers, but by life. Now it's a life, which is very different from the thirties: though terms like "fascism", "capitalism" or "socialism" are still widely used, but for the majority of our politicians (both in the USA and elsewhere) they are hardly anything today but a purely technological means to hide their lust for immense power and immense wealth. That's – for modern politicians. As for modern voters – I can't agree with Mr. Gary Scharnhorst's afterword: "Lewis’s message— his protest of middle-class complacency and intellectual regimentation, what we today call “political correctness” on both the left and the right— remains as relevant and timely as ever". With all my love to optimism, I think that in our sad reality this book isn't timely any more. Which doesn't make it less great, of course. What's the use to read it most attentively in our 2014 then (except pure pleasure of a fine literature's taste, naturally)? Well, another American author, Mr. Ray Bradbury, saw this use in his "Fahrenheit 451", where a few fugitives from the book-burning world were learning pages of Bible, Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Thoreau and other treasures by heart. Because they were thinking: "We'll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way. But you can't MAKE people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last". Being an optimist I believe too with all my heart that it can't last and, thus, "It Can't Happen Here" does certainly deserve to be passed on to our good children "by word of mouth", - so, please, read it! Rostislav, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.