One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Paperback) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mr. H T Willetts

from skavlanj

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich should be required reading. When everything you read and hear and watch is stained with a hyper-politicized Us v. Them mentality, it's enlightening to see what true tyranny looks like. Starting with the author's bio ("In 1945 [Solzhenitsyn] was arrested and ...

from Clara53

I had to just sit quietly for awhile after finishing this book. The enormity of the message had to sink in: this unimaginable human endurance (both mental and physical) in the face of cruelty, humiliation, as well as most base and inhumane conditions in the gulag, astonished me. Slavery of a diff...

from Robert_R._Mitchell

The words spoken and written about this novel far outnumber the millions of Soviets sentenced to the gulags it describes. It would seem, therefore, that the only possibility of saying something "new" is to describe our own personal reaction to the story. Even then, our words are not "new" in the ...

from JoK

Fellow reviewers have spoken at length about the accuracy and historical relevance of the portrayal of the Soviet Gulag system in _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_. They have detailed the harsh conditions, the complex mechanics of survival in the Gulag, the terror of Stalin's government, a...

from JMlibrarian

Deeply affecting and difficult to recover from. Comparable to the best Holocaust fiction or Angela's Ashes in its impact. Once I was drawn into this deceptively simple story of one man's day in a Siberian labor camp under Stalin's regime, I could not put the book down. I had it like a disease. Ha...