Francis Wheen’s Karl Marx: A Life is the first major biography since the end of the Cold War of the father of Communism. While previous biographers have suffered from an inability to view Marx and his work apart from the regimes spawned in his name, Wheen gives us not a mythical socialist ogre but a fascinating, maddening, ultimately humane man.

Paradox and passion were the animating spirits of Marx’s life. A Prussian émigré who would become the picture of a middle-class English gentleman, a fiery agitator who spent most of his time in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room, a gregarious host who eventually alienated all but one or two friends, Marx had a sweeping, stormy existence that resembled nothing so much as a novel by Laurence Sterne or George Eliot. “Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hegel fused into one person,” said a contemporary, “and you have Dr. Marx.”

Wheen also illuminates the foggiest questions surrounding Marx’s work: Was he, as his detractors have claimed, a self-hating Jew? What did Marx really mean by his famous remark “Religion is the opiate of the masses”? Were the prophecies of The Communist Manifesto mistaken? Does Capital, Marx’s masterwork, deserve the ridicule with which modern-day economists have dismissed it?

The triumph of Karl Marx is its indelible portrait of the man himself. Marx’s lifelong marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, “the most beautiful girl in Trier” and daughter of a redoubtable baron, whose devotion to her husband was tested by decades of poverty and exile, is as affecting a love story as history offers. Even more arresting is Wheen’s reconstruction of what is perhaps the most inspiring friendship of the nineteenth century. Friedrich Engels was the heir of the lucrative textile firm Ermen & Engels, an invincibly bourgeois man whose taste for women and fox-hunting knew no bounds. Yet it was Engels who first enlightened Marx on the contradictions of capitalism, and who would lateer finance him (often with money pilfered from the family strongbox), ghostwrite many of Marx’s journalistic pieces, and serve as his tireless defender.

From Trier to Berlin, Bonn, Paris, and England (“The rock,” Marx lamented, “against which the revolutionary waves break”), Marx lived both at the center and on the fringes of his age. Not above penning pointless book-length jeremiads against rival thinkers while his masterwork went unwritten, or spending the last years of his life engaged in ruinous intrigue presiding over the fractious International Working Men’s Association, Marx also managed to change the world. With Karl Marx, Wheen has given us a hugely entertaining biography of one of history’s most unforgettable players.