Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Gary Saul Morson revisits The God That Failed, a Cold War classic that explained the appeal of communism to generations of readers—and whose warnings, he argues, have become timely once again. To receive Things Worth Remembering directly in your inbox, sign up here. Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.