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4.26 AVERAGE
4.26 AVERAGE
Good book, just make it through the chapters "the law as a child" , "the law becomes a man" , and "the law matures" and you'll be okay. Those are like watching paint dry.
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Not an easy read, and this was only Volume 1. Over 600 pages of gut-wrenching examples of man's ability to torture and punish man based on his own reactions to (and inability to deal with) fear. The hard part isn't in reading the dreadful details of how a slip of the tongue can lead to 10 + 10 + 10 years in a Siberian camp, or the conditions in the camps themselves, or the unfairness of life itself across the board, but in Solzhenitsyn's ability to throw so much of it at you that you become a bit numbed to it. The author probably does this on purpose, because every dozen pages or so, his bitter humor brings you back to the surface for a sanity check, and you are once again human. Not for everyone, but certainly worth 4 out of 5 stars.
I will definitely be picking this up again. The writing is great, but I have to return it to the library.
Part 1 read like a stream of consciousness about the different stages of the “process” of imprisoning people.
Part 2 was better and easier to follow. “The Ships of the Archipelago” was the best chapter of both parts.
I don’t know of I will try to read the other volumes.
Part 2 was better and easier to follow. “The Ships of the Archipelago” was the best chapter of both parts.
I don’t know of I will try to read the other volumes.
In a lifetime there are some books which mark you forever, changing your perspective on the world. The Gulag Archipelago is most certainly one of them.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
challenging
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
I really enjoyed the book….when I read it. I found myself not able to fully finish so take this with a grain of salt. It was interesting to learn about the mass imprisonment in the U.S.S.R, but it just took too long to read. 25 pages took 1 hour or more.
I am listening to the unabridged version of this book from Audible. Before I started it, I did a little poking around online to see what people are saying about it. I was a little surprised to find how many Putin/Russian apologists there are with a lot of incentive to discredit the book. Those critics to me show why this book is so important. They talk about how it is no comprehensive account of the Gulags, and how Solzhenitsyn just collected a bunch of camp gossip. But that's the entire point. He says that that is just what he was doing, because he feared (or knew) that the true story would never be told to the world with scholarship based on whatever records the Soviet state chose to be left around.
I'm only a third of the way through the entire book, but let me record a few thoughts here. This is an excellent and important book. Sections of it are very powerful, some of the most powerful I've read. One that stands out is right at the beginning - where he talks about how people were arrested right off the street and how if everyone being taken had fought back and refused to go quietly, that it's likely that the Soviet regime couldn't have gotten away with it like they did.
A lot of this should be read by everyone - it really shows a vivid portrait of a cruel and unjust system, the veneer of justice that is necessary to keep up appearances, the little compromises made by authority figures for their own convenience, that cumulatively brought incredible suffering on the prisoners. He paints a vivid picture of arrest, torture in interrogation, and prison life, one that could only come from an eyewitness, and truly many eyewitnesses.
Although I've enjoyed the book, it is one that would be far better if abridged. In between the moving and brilliant sections there are others that drag on and on - pages describing trial after trial in detail, or documenting changes to the prison system over the years. I know there are abridgments, I'm interested to compare them and see if they are worth recommending highly.
There is a bit of profanity and crude language to discuss crude topics.
I'm only a third of the way through the entire book, but let me record a few thoughts here. This is an excellent and important book. Sections of it are very powerful, some of the most powerful I've read. One that stands out is right at the beginning - where he talks about how people were arrested right off the street and how if everyone being taken had fought back and refused to go quietly, that it's likely that the Soviet regime couldn't have gotten away with it like they did.
A lot of this should be read by everyone - it really shows a vivid portrait of a cruel and unjust system, the veneer of justice that is necessary to keep up appearances, the little compromises made by authority figures for their own convenience, that cumulatively brought incredible suffering on the prisoners. He paints a vivid picture of arrest, torture in interrogation, and prison life, one that could only come from an eyewitness, and truly many eyewitnesses.
Although I've enjoyed the book, it is one that would be far better if abridged. In between the moving and brilliant sections there are others that drag on and on - pages describing trial after trial in detail, or documenting changes to the prison system over the years. I know there are abridgments, I'm interested to compare them and see if they are worth recommending highly.
There is a bit of profanity and crude language to discuss crude topics.
Soviet Russia under Stalin was a bizarro world where anyone could be arrested at anytime for anything. Solzhenitsyn pulls no punches in his exhaustive study of the prison camp system. The weight and seriousness one expects in Russian literature is here, peppered with biting sarcasm, moments of great descriptive beauty, and philosophy. Both literary and journalistic, this first volume covers Lenin's creation of the legal code allowing for the gulag system, the individuals who ran it, the show trials and purges that grew it, the randomness of how citizens found themselves caught up in it (metaphorically referred to as a game of solitaire), and their first experiences once inside. No detail is spared, whether bureaucratic and mundane or malevolent and violent. A fascinating portrait of a bleak and strange world.