Interesting reads

I am spending a great deal of time today trying to decide if my kids are ready for the next book in our history curriculum. I loved The Story of the World Book 3, but Book 4 moves into the modern era. We will have 2 world wars to discuss, atomic bombs and mass genocide. Gah!
The intro of Book 4 has captured me though and I feel like there is so much good that could come of it. Here is an excerpt:

Again and again, while researching this book, I was reminded of the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eleven years in the labor camps of the Soviet Union, and who, when he became powerless, finally understood that revolution never brings an end to oppression. Solzhenitsyn wrote, "In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor...And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good...Even in the best of hearts there remains...and unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being...And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them." 

Revolution shatters the structures; but the men who build the next set of structures haven't conquered the evil that lives in their own hearts. The history of the twentieth century is, again and again, the story of men who fight against tyrants, win the battle, and then are overwhelmed by the unconquered tyranny in their own souls.

 When I googled Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I found this address he gave at Harvard in 1978. It is an interesting view of an easterner on our western world. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html