Rating: 
Summary: Read book in Norwegian translation 30 years ago
Review: When I was in high school back in Norway in the late '60s I found this book on my dad's bookshelf. It was the Norwegian translation (retranslated: "Desperate Flight"). I have never forgotten the book. I find myself often thinking about it. When I recently went back to Norway to get my old journals I found I had made a note about the English title. Today I searched amazon.com, and it came right up. Needless to say I will buy it and see if I can make my kids read it.
Rating:
Summary: Best nonfiction work I've ever read! Better than fiction.
Review: Few books of nonfiction have the power to rivet as The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. - An officer in the Polish Cavalry, during World War II., Rawicz becomes a prisoner of the Soviets and sentenced to a Siberian prison with other war-time "spies" and "enemies of the State". Following harrowing life in the infamous Lubyanka prison and on the long trek to Northern Siberia, Rawicz and a small group of international prisoners plan an escape by daring to WALK out of Siberia to the Himalayas and the Gobi Desert! This is a hard one to put down as you accompany this small group of brave souls in their battle for survival and freedom against the most staggering odds! High marks for tension and suspense!
Rating:
Summary: One of Century's great stories...or fiction?
Review: I've read this twice and I understand the two or three sceptical reviews. My own questions are these: 1) Why go through the Gobi instead of around it? The American and the Lithuanian were educated men and, one would think, would have suggested skirting the Gobi even if it meant crossing back into parts of lightly-settled southern Siberia. 2)Instead of crossing the Himalayas at their highest point to get to India, why not cross in British Burma or even French (albeit Vichy) Indochina? Japan was not at war with Britain or France until December, 1941 so both should have been considered safe havens. If this is a true story, and I think it is, it is one of the most heroic, wonderful tales of our age. We may be in store for independent research on the subject of this book shortly. Actor George Clooney has the film rights to the book and his TV contract has, I believe, only a year remaining. If he films The Long Walk, I am sure some enterprising investigative journalist will track down the ins and outs of Rawicz's tale.
Rating: 
Summary: TRUTH OR FANTASIES?
Review: It's amazing how the author was able to remember exact quotes thirty years after the fact. Maybe he had a tape recorder. Oh, and the party of escapees crossed the Lena River. Just crossed it, period. No mention of the river's size or the temperature or how they managed to overcome little inconveniences like hypothermia. Did they wade or use a raft? The author leaves out some other critical points, like walking across the Gobi desert without water. Pretty determined group! Use your time in another way.
Rating: 
Summary: an incredible story that happens to be true
Review: the style is simple and direct, the subject is simply incredible. I enjoed reading it.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful contrast with the over-hyped "Cold Mountain"
Review: By merest coincidence, I read this book immediately after finishing the trendy new work "Cold Mountain." What a contrast! In search of "authenticity," Cold Mountain's author is happy to wallow in the mud and burden us with all the gory details of the lusts and violence of his characters. Slavomir Rawicz doesn't need to do this -- he knows that his story is compelling enough to stand on its own merits. Rawicz's chronicle is an inspiring story of decency, courage, and human kindness. Some of these elements are present in Cold Mountain, but you have to dig in the mud for them. While this is not a trendy book, it is a deeply satisfying story of everyday people transformed by hardship. The author and his party overcome great obstacles to reach their destination, and they do it without bludgeoning, debauching, or even cursing. As I said, what a contrast. I left Long Walk with a restored sense of the basic goodness of my fellow human beings -- quite the opposite of the feelings I had after reading Cold Mountain. Read this book! I guarantee that you will find it intensely moving and almost impossible to put down.
Rating:
Summary: MOST MOVING AND INSPIRING STORY I'VE READ IN LAST 20 YEARS
Review: This was a moving and profound true story and I didn't want the book to end. A story of ordinary human beings reaching into the innermost recesses of their being to do extraordinary things in order to survive. I felt like one of their close traveling companions and rooted and felt deeply for them at every horrible step of their way. In this book you will share their joys and their sorrows, seeing life through their eyes. Does every chapter or sentence convey a horrible or sad experience? Not at all. There are humorous moments which are all the more touching because they illustrate humanity's ability to laugh and play and be silly in the gravest of circumstances. These people were heroes. And they could have been you or me. I think one challenge any writer would face in relating such a tale is to do so without making oneself the leader or the center of the group. In short, without making oneself into some kind of hero or superman. The narrator overcomes this challenge successfully. You never get the sense that there is an ego getting in the way of the facts. The story is told fully yet simply. This guy wrote the book at the repeated urging not only of friends who knew him well and his pain but also at the express direction of his doctor who told him it might help exorcise some of his demons. He teamed up with a British journalist who developed a sufficiently trusting relationship with the Polish-born author to get him to open up and talk. This author didn't do it for the money. This author basically has made very little on the book over the years. It is still not a widely known book and no one has ever made a movie of it. It had a small printing and then after many years became sort of an underground classic. I think anyone would like this book. If you are human and have friends and can relate to others, you are going to identify with one or another of the primary characters and will quickly become spellbound. Let's never forget these poor souls who fell victim to Stalin's gulag. It's the least we can do for them - the living and those they buried along their escape route together.
Rating:
Summary: The Long Walk - a timeless story of the will to be free
Review: I first read this book years ago, when it was almost considered an underground publication regarding what was actually going on in the Soviet Union. I showed it to my friends, and many shook their heads and refused to read it, because for some reason they thought it was part of a disinformation plot by Red Scare conspiracists.
Now that the USSR is fallen and former officials themselves are admitting the brutality of the Soviet system, it is now correct to read such a book as The Long Walk.
This is very good, because the book is actually a timeless story about survival in the face of incredible odds, the will and longing to find a measure of liberty, and the heart-wrenching tale of one man's suffering. Very inspiring, and very instructive of what is sometimes required in order to simply live on to tell the tale....
Rating:
Summary: It is too good to be true....
Review: If Rawicz's account of his escaping from the Soviet prison were true, it would be one of the most extraordinary testament to the human endurance. The author claimed that during the crossing of the Gobi desert in the middle of the summer, the escaping party didn't have a single sip of water for as long as fourteen days, ( whereas a normal human being needs as much as a gallon of water per day just to survival). Rawicz's account of crossing the Himalayan mountain range during the winter without food supply makes his story even less believable. He even claimed the party throwing rocks to a couple of Yeti to make them move out of the way! Little wonder in the fifty years since the book was first published, nobody else has confirmed Rawicz's story. One should read Heinrich Harrer's "Seven years in Tibet" for a little appreciation of just how much effort is needed to walk across the Himalayan range.
Rating:
Summary: Never to be forgotten...
Review: Sitting in an overcrowded schoolroom on a damp winter's afternoon with the drip drip drip of rain drops from blazers onto the floor, it would have been a challenge for any teacher to engage us. But through the rising steam of soggy adolescants - standing at the chalk face - Miss Jones suddenly changed my life. "When you've all settled down," she said..."I want you to open the books in front of you. This is an extraordinary story." She was right.
Read out loud by Basher or Glug or Avis it was still the most remarkable story I'd ever heard. To this day it has never been forgotten. My father served with the RAF during the war, volunteering at 18 years of age the very day war was declared. He never faced the hardships or rigours endured by Lt.Rawicz. But he did loose most of his comrades, and he has spent many years telling me stories from the front. So with a receptive mind, my ears pricked up at The Long Walk, and to this day more than twenty years later, it is still the best story I have ever read or heard.
To have survived the enslaught of Sept 1939 is remarkable enough...but to have continued to endure, and escape is the stuff of legends.
This story, taughtly written with always enough but never too much, compels the reader to read on. Its great quality is the way it absorbs the reader into the plot...somehow you are there too traversing the icy wastes and burning desserts...with only the idea of freedom shimmering up ahead like a mirage. Ofcourse there are great novels which might keep one equally enthralled, but this has a higher quality. It really happened. Like Lawrence of Arabia, Slavomir Rawicz and his comrades seem to have discovered a deep pool of endurance within themselves to keep them going - and by so doing they have inspired all who have read this trully remarkable tale.
What would the odds be of walking out of a Siberian death camp - where the guards were so sure of the appalling vastness surrounding it that they did not even bother to errect fences - to embark on a journey south to India? They would seem to be so unlikely as to cause at least one other reviewer to doubt its authenticity. And who can blame him.
The fact is World war Two, in which more than fifty million people lost their lives did throw up extraordinary tales of human endurance and the ability of some to survive. If it does nothing else, The Long Walk, is a tribute to them all.
|
