In The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto provides an affectionate and careful journey through the final two years of Marx's life. These years are, as Musto notes (p. 5), frequently neglected in full biographies. Marx prepared almost nothing for publication during these years—only a short (but important) preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. This was due, partly, to illness. He spent almost all of 1882 traveling—to the Isle of Wight, Algeria, and various spas in France and Switzerland—in search of relief from bronchitis and pleurisy. Moreover, these years were dominated by the deaths of his two Jennys: his wife in December of 1881, and his eldest daughter in the first days of 1883.

Despite this, Musto treats these years as intellectually fruitful. Because he was not publishing, reconstructing Marx's intellectual life entails reporting on his reading notes. These are voluminous, even in these years of illness and grief, and the recitation of their contents can be a bit tedious. Despite Musto's effort to inject some theoretical interest, the massive “annotated year-by-year timeline of world events”—from 91 BCE to the Treaty of Westphalia—that Marx produced late in 1881 (pp. 99–102) seems to have been a way of literally marking time as his wife succ