Rating: 
Summary: An Epic Tale
Review: The Long Walk should be required reading for amy who would question the depth of the human spirit. This book literally takes your breath away. That these men could endure so much is a testimony to their courage, inner strength and endurance.
Rating: 
Summary: Not so true story
Review: Odd that Rawicz's Mongolians walk everywhere rather than ride horses, and dress in conical hats (something no one else has observed). Odd that he claims to have gone for 12 days in the Gobi without water - he must have been ready for a beer or two after that. And perhaps he had consumed more than a couple of beers when he met the yetis in the high Himalayas. It's also odd that Rawicz has refused to authenticate any of his claims and declined to produce records, photographs, witnesses, or the full identity or whereabouts of the other survivors. I think the bit on the cover, which claims that this is a "true story", may need revising.
Rating:
Summary: Determination
Review: There can be little doubt that history is more interesting than fiction. This particular account proves the point. It is hard and perhaps impossible to imagine the difficulties described in this book if they hadn't actually occurred. I sometimes have to pause and appreciate the problems even our own American pioneers faced as they moved across this land many years ago. These accounts pale when compared to the things which confronted Rawicz and his companions as they walked to freedom in the wake of WW-II. While I've not read exhaustively about the war, this book..as others have noted..was one very difficult to set aside. I recommend it very highly. I covered the material via tape from Blackstone Audio.
Rating: 
Summary: The Long Walk - a short review !
Review: The reflections of a Polish cavalry officer during the outset of the Second World War may not strike you as riveting stuff but in this case you would be sadly mistaken. Reading this book takes you on a journey which tested the physical, emotional and mental limits of the author's endurance. The free flowing narrative with its perceptive attention for detail draws us into a world of human cruelty and despair and the reader's sense of shock is unnervingly stretched by each turn of the page. We find ourselves accompanying the author as a young man being found guilty by a 'kangaroo court' in Russia and then being subjected to the vicious and dehumanizing effects of torture. This however is only the beginning of the beginning as we then stand beside him as he endeavours to survive the awful realities of being hearded across Siberia to a camp designed to accommodate such prisoners. When many human beings would have simply died or lost the will to carry on, we find in the author and a group of his fellow prisoners an immutable determination not to be extinguished from existance. What follows is a prison escape which takes 1 year, covers 4000 miles and requires already ill treated men to walk from the artic circle to India with only a few items which the average boy scout would laugh at. The reader's sense of disbelief is married to utter admiration as the pain, tragedy and misery of such a journey becomes evident. The author cleverly recreates this journey, from the oven of the Gobi desert to the treacherous Himalayan mountains, in such a way that betrays the fact that your're not actualy there. You find yourself sharing the groups woes and joys as they struggle against nature to stay alive. Their enviable determiantion to keep moving forward is echoed in the desire to continue reading which this book engenders. Well worth a go !
Rating:
Summary: A short novel with a big heart
Review: This is the story of a party of escapees from a Siberian labor camp and their trek to freedom. Written with amazing flair and style, the trek becomes your own as you read of the harrowing experiences and wonder how these men (and one woman) could possibly have survived all that they did. I found myself wondering at times if it would not have been better for them to return to the slave camp! Truly a fabulous account and a must read.
Rating:
Summary: WOW
Review: In a place so bleak, to find a bit of compassion from such an unlikely source that leads a courageous group to freedom....This was a great story. I'm grateful to be an American who has not endured war, prison, or work camps. I have passed the book on to numerous people who also couldn't put it down!
Rating:
Summary: Truth, Reality, and the Yeti
Review: What is truth? What is reality? The narrator of "The Long Walk," Slavomir Rawicz, clearly exhibits an unquenchable hatred for the Soviets and an undisguised disgust for the American and British leaders who allowed the Soviets to occupy and dominate his native land of Poland, to wit: "The Poles have suffered more than any other nation through the centuries." "Then came Yalta with its humiliating sale of great parts of Europe to the bastardly, inhuman treatment by Stalin, the KGB, and the Moscow-trained puppets and paid stooges...." "I lost my home in eastern Poland through the duping of Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, where they . . . signed away all of the Eastern Block countries to Russia, thus forcing these countries to follow the dictates of their Russian invaders." Can we trust the truth of a narrative told by one with such emotions? By his own admission as well as comments by Ronald Downing, a British newspaper reporter who wrote down Rawicz's narrative with the help of translating dictionaries, the narrator was never totally fluent in English. Considering the sensationalist types of stories that reporters write to sell newspapers, added to a language barrier, can we trust the reality of this narrative? Can the reader believe that a small band of desperate men and, for part of the trip, a young woman, could actually cross rushing rivers in a Siberian winter without freezing to death? Could stagger across the Gobi Desert without water, surviving on half-cooked snake meat and mud? Could climb the Himalayas without gear or warm clothing? Could stare face to face with the yeti? Can the descriptions of these seemingly impossible feats be believed? "The Long Walk" is a retold narrative of an incredible escape from a Siberian labor camp and the trek of a tiny band of ill-equipped men and one young woman for thousands of miles through blizzard, across burning desert, and over the highest mountain range on earth to the safety of India. The story begins in 1939 and ends in 1942. Of the eight people who begin the trek, four end it. Is this a true story as the subtitle says: "The True Story of a Trek to Freedom"? We must ask ourselves what truth is, what reality is, what accuracy is. I believe that the events recorded in this book are indeed true and real, inasmuch as they are true and real in survivor Rawicz's mind and insofar as reporter Downing understood what Rawicz intended through the mixture of Polish, Russian and English through which the narrative unfolded. Had you and I been on that Himalayan peak with Rawicz, would we have seen the yeti also? Perhaps not, but, in his state of mind, Rawicz did. Whether or not each of us would have seen the many incidents of near death and nearly miraculous survival exactly as they are portrayed in the book is, of course, doubtful. After all, the book is showing them to us as they exist in the memories of a man driven nearly to insanity by extremities of suffering that we can only imagine. Plus, they are filtered again through the phraseology of a newspaper writer. Nonetheless, this book succeeds in giving the reader a view of individual daring and suffering during World War II that the dry facts and statistics in high school and college history texts fail miserably to portray. And, for that matter, never forget that even those books are written by victors and that the truth they describe may be quite different from the truth that exists in the minds of the vanquished. So, yes, this book is as true as any other histories you will read, and the history it presents is not one that you will easily forget.
Rating: 
Summary: A testimonial to human will, but to be taken on faith
Review: A Polish officer whose mother was Russian, Rawicz was caught up in the Russian invasion of Eastern Poland in 1939, after escaping from the coincident German invasion of Western Poland. He eventually was sent to the Gulag, Camp 303, in the fall of 1940, and reached it in late January, 1941. The trip had begun by rail from outside Moscow in mid-November, and ended in a forty-day chained march north from Irkutsk, to within 300-400 miles of as the Arctic circle, west of Irkutsk. Most of prisoners had died by then. As with everything concerning the Gulag, all train and chain-gang operations had taken place away from habitations. The Long Walk is not this chaingang trek at temperatures sometimes below -40 to camp 303, but the 4000-mile walk south which began three months later, on Easter Sunday, 1941, and brought Rawicz and a small group of escapees from the camp to the Himalayan foothills north of Calcutta 11 months later, after crossing Siberia, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas by foot. Published fourteen years later, in 1956, in English, the book is now a classic, as a Google search will attest. Unavoidably, all dates and locations are approximate at best. There are two maps. No index. The original escapees from Camp 303 were seven, three Poles, a Czech, a Lithuanian, a Yugoslav and an American. At the north end of Lake Baikal they took in a girl escapee from another camp. They otherwise avoided all human contact until they were out of the USSR, and then also avoided the Chinese. Until out of the USSR, they traveled with nothing but what they began with, bags, one knife and one axe head, for which they made a handle. Later, they little but some wire. Once they reached Tibetan villages, which were much wider-spread then than they are now, they were easily given food and advice by villagers. This certainly accounts for their survival. Nevertheless, they travelled under conditions of nearly constant hunger, and for months under conditions of great thirst. Two members, one man and the girl, were lost to scurvy when crossing the Gobi. The Lithuanian died of sheer exhaustion near Lhasa, and one man dropped into an abyss when climbing down from the Himalayas. They were four to reach Calcutta and the English army, and all four then lost about a month to insanity, so that what we have here is one man's tale from memory after this episode. Primo Levi tells of a minority of "Moslems" in the concentration camps who simply resigned themselves to their lot, and soon died. In Rawicz's case, the "Moslems" would have died before reaching the camp. Simply surviving that first walk, and then three months of Gulag, certainly drove some detainees into a single-purpose frame of mind, the opposite of the "Moslem" attitude, which steeled them to escape. Rawicz and a friend recruited their companions on this criterion, a "beyond reason" drive to get out, and they chose well. They were most lucky in following an indication (from the wife of the camp commander, who held the post as a form of punishment) that they should go south, while all detainees thought of going west back to Russia, or East to the Pacific. Both directions led to certain death or recapture. By the time they reached Lake Baikal, about a quarter of the way, the group had melded itself into a unit whose one command was to walk, walk, walk. The month of insanity at the end was the price paid to recover their ordinary sanity from these nine months of total singleness of purpose. As told, the tale can neither be documented nor confirmed by anyone. If the book is true, it is a testimony to a feat of the human will. But, perhaps because of the single-mindedness that was needed to live to tell the tale, it is not a very deep story, sticking to the kind of events one would record in a log, and especially poor in physiological observations. The Long Walk cannot compare with, for instance, The Worst Journey in the World. The problem is not that it is bare-bones reporting, which it is, but that the reporting centers on chaining simple objective events, as if the author was searching his memory less for what he lived and what shaped him, than for a police report. There is a note at the start that Ronald Downing "helped [Rawicz] write the book." The English is competent if slightly out-of-tune. On p. 117 there is a repeated naming error that no one named Rawicz would commit, hopefully the deed of an overactive copy editor for this edition. Several parts of the book beggar belief, such as crossing the Gobi without any water reserve. Worst of all is the careful observation by the entire group of a Yeti couple (in this case, bear-like beings standing on two legs for half an hour, without protuding ears, larger than humans). In the place where the Yeti were observed, even mere humans lacked any food source. Most unexplainable, though, is the Yetis' behavior as reported by Rawicz. Crediting a trick of memory would be easier if the entire book was not so devoid of simple daily feelings. In the thirties England had celebrated "Grey Owl", an English writer passing himself off as a Canadian metis. In 1956, with "The Third Eye", it was starting twenty years of the tales of a worse fake, Lobsang Rampa, a "Tibetan monk" who was up to then a London plumber. There is nothing in The Long Walk that could not be assembled from books published by 1956, although the Gulag description (minus the camp commander's wife and the easy recruitment of a perfect group) is a remarkably good report in English for the time.
Rating:
Summary: Puts things in perspective, that's for sure!
Review: This is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. It's so incredible that anyone could live through an ordeal like this. Read to know what horrors people are capable of - and what fantastic acts men can push their bodies and minds to achieve.
Rating:
Summary: Want to buy a bridge?
Review: This story is unbelievable but entertaining. One's incredulity was stretched by their journey and subsequently exceeded with the sighting of the abdomitable snowmen at the end. The fact that the survivors never stayed in touch also detracts. A swim across the Indian Ocean was the only unbelievable element left out. He would have been a great salesman.
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