– Customer review on 28/01/2008

Volume two of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's shattering study of the Russian Gulag is equally as impressive as volume one and just as affecting. Having dealt with the process of arrest and interrogation in volume one, he now moves on to look at life in the Gulag labour camps. This volume is equally as long as the first but necessarily so: though the basic pattern of the Gulag was largely the same, the individual experiences and possibilities of what could befall the prisoners means there is a wealth of material about life in the prisoner system. Solzhenitsyn uses people's individual stories to both paint a picture of the system as a whole and show the petty little individual tyrannies perpetrated against the prisoners. This is not an easy read at all as the sheer length is somewhat relentless, but that only underlines Solzhenitsyn's purpose in illustrating the inhumanity perpetrated on an entire people.