From a reader:

[Eastman’s] book, “Reflections on the Failure of Socialism” is quite good. It was not met with many kudos, and he is said to have felt it was far from perfect, but I liked it and thought it made all the right points. Short, a primer.
The parallel case from Britain was, of course, John Strachey. The biography by Hugh Thomas, “John Strachey”, was published by Harper & Row in 1973, and is well worth reading. Strachey (of the famous family, and himself a genuine intellectual) was in the 1930s the premier apologist for Communism in GB (and that’s saying something), became a complete apostate after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and went on to an illustrious military career in WWII. Strachey was in most ways a great man; it’s a helluva story, well beyond Eastman’s.
And I do hope you have read “Out of Step” by Sidney Hook.
[Name withheld]
PS: Strachey’s “The Nature of the Capitalist Crisis” (1935) is the only detailed, serious attempt to make the case for Marxist economics that I’ve ever come across. It fails, of course, but it’s a good, honest try by a guy who had done his homework; Strachey was no dilettante, and he seems to have had great integrity in everything he did. (The bible for systematically dissecting the corpse of Marxist economics is, of course, “From Marx to Mises”, by David Ramsay Steele. A sheerly wonderful book.)