For a more "nuanced" view try:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/black_red/
Or especially:
http://www.linguafranca.com/br/9911/shatz.html
....which points out some flawed scholarship - such as:
"Unfortunately, Werth and Margolin's contributions are the exception. The trouble with The Black Book of Communism does not end with the introduction. While there is no denying the atrocities visited on the victims of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, the book's treatment of communism in Latin America is so one-sided that it might as well be plucked from a U.S. State Department report. We are given the total count of war victims in Sandinista Nicaragua, but we are not told that most of those deaths were caused by the U.S.-funded contras, referred to here as the
"anti-Sandinista resistance."
Well...ya gotta reach 100 million somehow...