Recent enhancements to the website of Pathfinder Press — www.pathfinderpress.com — make it easier for working people and youth to find their way to books presenting the lessons of 175 years of revolutionary working-class struggle, through the eyes of participants, from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to Fidel Castro, V.I. Lenin, Malcolm X and leaders of the Socialist Workers Party today.
The books are published “to advance the construction of a communist party in the United States — an objective that is inseparable from the building of a communist movement internationally,” explains Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder’s president.
Now available on the website are excerpts from over 400 reviews of more than 161 titles, reflecting the broad interest in the authors and subject matter, to help the books reach a wider audience. Some date back to the 1930s, including a New York Times review of Samuel Yellen’s American Labor Struggles.
Nine reviews are now available of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes. An excerpt from Foreword Reviews says, “People who are interested in the history of civil rights, political theory, or socialism will find it fascinating.”
Thirteen reviews are posted for Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family by Evelyn Reed. Publishers Weekly notes the book is “certain to become a classic text in women’s history … lucid and absorbing reading.”
‘Inside this Book’ feature
In addition to being able to magnify the front and back cover images of each book, another new feature is an “Inside this Book” tab. Site visitors are able to flip through sections of a book — its contents, introductions, some photographs and captions and the index. This allows readers to get a sense of a book’s content and quality before deciding whether to buy.
One example is the “About the Authors” section in Pathfinder’s newest title, Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity. Visitors to the website can read biographies of the book’s authors — Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, George Novack and Mary-Alice Waters. And the 2020 introduction to the new edition of Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, by SWP leader Dave Prince, can be read on the website.
Pathfinder Press is constantly improving its titles with larger and more readable type; more photographs, maps and illustrations; new and attractive covers; glossaries, footnotes and indexes.
Pathfinder books are an indispensable library for today’s working-class fighters and internationalists.