Book excerpt: If Marx in his famous quip called religion the opium of the people, opium was the religion of Marx (see page 28 of the book). Amid some 20,000 titles on Marx, this ranks as one of the most comprehensive and subversive studies of him. The reader learns for the first time here that: *This father of communism, idolized today as a beacon of light, was in truth a drug addict intent on stripping us all of civic freedoms and, still worse, corralling us into labor camps as superficial bourgeois riff-raff. *In contrast, his close friend Friedrich Engels imagined communism as a higher stage of civilization, and his views have mistakenly become associated with Marx. *Behind the faade of unity, Marx and Engels feuded over the goals, strategy, and tactics of communism. This conflict marred The Communist Manifesto and Capital, warranting their fundamental reinterpretation. *Engels initiated an astonishing image makeover that eventually transformed Marx the self-appointed gravedigger of civil society into its savior. Apart from challenges to serious students of Marx and Marxism, the book also offers intersecting human-touch stories of his dark self, his family, friends and contemporaries.