Rating: 
Summary: Project Week at Putney
Review: This book is one that completely engages all of your senses. It is frighteningly unsettling most of the time, yet the pages turn fluidly and without hesitation. The fact that these are people who live and have lived in these conditions is awakening. Slavomir Rawicz's terrifying experience in a Russian labor camp and the path he survived while being delivered there, resembled true-life stories of concentration camps during WWII. Rawicz's escape from the labor camp was equally, if not more, shocking. It makes the life of any free person seem luxurious. Rawicz's passion for life is beautiful! He carries himself through human brutality, skin and bones, and many more near death matches, while holding his will above it all. Throughout the entire journey I was most touched by Rawicz's ability to digest the experiences he was up against moment by moment with out self-pity or complaint. Rawicz and the other lives in this book will remind anyone of the value of freedom and the drive that enables us to fight for it when we are caged.
Rating:
Summary: A Walk Of Courage
Review: This book is powerful, moving, and beautifully written. The daring escape made by the author and his comrades from the Russians and their adventures to freedom will make you laugh as well as cry.
I have never read a book that was more full of adventure, bravery, and hope. It's not sweetened up with a mushy love story or anything, which makes it even more real.
This is most definitely a must read for anyone wanting a new view on culture and heroism.
Rating:
Summary: almost perfect
Review: QUICK REVIEW
This is a story of a man and his fellow prisoners who struggle to make their way to freedom. It is an incredible account of endurance and the will to survive. An all around great story that is definitely worth reading. FULL REVIEW
This is truly an astounding story. This book will amaze its readers and will grab their attention from the very beginning, and on through the rest of the book. You will hear of the terrible mistreatment of prisoners, but also their lasting endurance. The harshness of their travels and the weather, but also their unyielding determination. This story is about the struggle to survive intense experiences, and the drive to fight all odds for freedom. There is so much that is great about this book and if I were pressed to come up with something not good about it - there would be only two things that I could come up with. The first would be toward the end of the book when their travels take them to little village after little village. This is the only time in the whole book where it gets semi-slow, as not much is happening. The second thing is the believability of some of the facts. Just a couple of times he says what was happening or how something happened, and you wonder if that is totally possible, considering a human's level of endurance. I do not doubt that the author remembers it like he tells it, but it's possible that he was in such traumatic situations that things seemed more extreme than they might have been. It is possible that the facts are all correct, but maybe the reader should give the author a little bit of leeway to tell it exactly as he remembers it, and maybe not exactly as it was. This happens in only a couple of select parts and it does not ruin the story at all. So other than those two things it is an incredible book. It is very easy to read and to keep up with what is going on, as you feel like you are traveling with them. It is an astonishing story and definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Well Worn Shoes
Review: This is an account of a young Polish man, 25 and recently married, who was sent to work as a slave-laborer in Siberia by Stalinist Russia. He was tortured and put in a secret show-trial under the false allegations that he was a "spy." Why? Because the Soviet Union wanted free labor to manufacture things for the Soviet army. The gulags were an act of brutal slavery by the Soviet Union. It should be acknowledged. There were Americans also wasted their lives there. The misery of many wasted lives in Siberia, for both the young and the old.
He vividly describes his journey east: herded like cattle on trains, then marched through Winter blizzards en shackled in chains. Some died along the way. His escape is one of luck and careful planning, and the comraderie of his companions he escaped with on their trek to India, makes this story interesting. The hospitality of the many people who took them in and fed them and gave them shelter for a night is heartening. His account of Mongolia makes one want to go their. It is a sad tale of human misery yet also of determination and a struggle for freedom.
The writing is not spectacular but this is a very good quick read. I'd like to know more of what the author did specifically after reaching India. He lost his family and friends and beloved homeland, never being able to return after the war. Yes, there were times when I couldn't imagine a person survived such a long journey on foot without water. I don't know how they could have survived such a long journey, going days and days without water. And the crossing through Tibet, with what limited supplies they had is difficult to believe. Perhaps they went through only part of the Gobi desert. Perhaps some dates were forgotten because of a lack of a calendar. Regardless, this is a great book that is worth the read. After you read it you can make your on judgments. One can learn about the gulags and how they were administered also.
Rating:
Summary: AN EXTRAORDINARY PAGE-TURNER!
Review: I literally could not put this book down once I picked it up. I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. I also recommend Dorit Whiteman's recent book, Escape Via Siberia, which also tells an against-all-odds WW II survival story but provides a richer historical context.
Rating:
Summary: The best Read
Review: This book is amazing, although catagorised under adventrue and escape this does not sum up the book. Telling the story of a group of POWs who walked over 3000 miles to freedom during WW2, it talks about courage, survival, and friendship. An inspriational tale.
Rating:
Summary: one of a kind
Review: this is one of the best books i have ever read. since then, i have probably bought ten copies to give to friends. if you think your commute to the job is stressful-read this.
a pleasure to read in this age of whiney narratives.
Rating:
Summary: extraordinary
Review: In his terrific book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen provided us with a vital insight for analyzing the horrors of the Twentieth Century. The specific point that he made in the book was that Hitler would not have been able to perpetrate the Holocaust without significant levels of outright assistance and implicit support from vast segments of the German population. A more general point can, and should, be extrapolated from this : that the great tyrannies of the past hundred years have been in some disturbing sense dependent on the will of the people in those oppressive societies. As a democrat (small 'd') and a conservative, I am particularly drawn to this view by both my faith in the power of the people and by my skepticism about the capabilities of government. I simply find it impossible to believe that any government could long maintain itself in the face of general and spirited opposition from its citizenry. The most troubling aspect of this is that it requires us to face the fact that regimes which we find horrific--the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Red China, etc.--were, and are, essentially expressive of popular will, perhaps not of the majority, but of at least a plurality. Here too conservative philosophy is a help, because it is based on a fairly pessimistic view of human nature. Where the idealism of the Left assumes that Man is fundamentally good and that Man in the State of Nature is peaceful and selfless, we of the Right assume that Man is fundamentally selfish and violent. We would not find it surprising that one segment of society would try to oppress, or even exterminate, another. Now I'm not a complete pessimist : I do like to think that we (Americans) are different, and that we are sufficiently individualistic that would never tolerate totalitarianism here. Indeed, I maintain that much of American Literature is based on the premise of individuals resisting the soul deadening forces of oppressive society and that most of our greatest literary characters have been just such rugged individualists--from Huck Finn to Cool Hand Luke to RP McMurphy. These works, and the products of more popular culture like Red Dawn, express our belief that we (Americans) are different and reflect a hope that we would behave differently when faced with oppression. These are not beliefs that can, nor hopefully ever will be, put to the test. But it is notable that so much of our population is made up of those who fled oppression, and of their descendants. Perhaps, just perhaps, we--from Baptists to Quakers to Jews, from Huguenots to Irish to Vietnamese boat people--really are the kind of people who won't tolerate such oppression. Perhaps we have been fortunate enough to skim off the stubborn freedom loving cream of many nations. At any rate, central to this understanding--that people were more or less willing participants in their own oppression--is its opposite, that those who refused to participate had alternatives. And it is this that makes Oskar Schindler, Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cuban Freedom Flotillas, and the like so compelling to us; all serve to reinforce our belief that it is possible to refuse to be complicit in even these most coercive of systems. It is from this context that Slavomir Rawicz's great memoir, The Long Walk, derives its power. Rawicz was a Polish cavalry officer in WWII, serving during the futile resistance to the Nazi blitzkrieg. As a Russian speaking resident of Pinsk, in eastern Poland, the Soviets, who had taken over this portion of the partitioned land, simply assumed Rawicz was a spy and shipped him to a prison camp in Siberia--Camp Number 303 on the Lena River. On Easter Sunday 1941, Rawicz and six other prisoners escaped and started walking South. They eventually traveled the length of Lake Baikal, through Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, through Tibet, and over the Himalayas, before arriving in British-controlled India. Despite the hardships they faced, most of which you can imagine just from their itinerary, they were continually driven forward by a simple dream of freedom. Only four of their original number made it--a girl who joined their party along the way also died--and Rawicz (with his collaborator Ronald Downing) tells their story in a simple unaffected style, but their arduous journey speaks volumes about what individuals can achieve when they cling to that dream. The book, like their walk, is a triumph. Let the final word be Rawicz's own, from his 1993 Introduction to the book : I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for
all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves. I had to tell my story as a warning
to the living, and as a moral judgment for the greater good. GRADE : A+
Rating:
Summary: Vivid memories
Review: Its been about 25 years since I read this book and yet this tale of human endurance persistently remains in my memory even to this day. The book is well written and deserves a heroic praise.
Rating: 
Summary: A Far Fetched Tale of Adventure
Review: (Formerly written by myself in 1999) One should really never say never, but... Rawicz' harrowing tale of travel across the Himalayas smacks of an overactive imagination. The circumstances and events he and his mates were able to conquer would be impossible to replicate without everyone dying, and implausible on historical grounds. 1)He consistently states that he tried to travel and average of 20 -30 miles per day walking 8-12 hours and assumes that he actually achieved such an average. It is impossible to travel through the topography of the regions he describes, esp. the Himalayan foothills and achieve anything more than about 10 miles on an exceptionally good day (on flat ground with good maps). His average should have been about 8 miles /day. I know this since I have travelled with light pack through much of the area Rawicz describes. With a 16 kilo backpack in very good shape I was able to make an average of 5 miles across rough terrain --- and this is with enough food on established trails. Rawicz states that most of the time they were not on trails. 2) The group was pretty desperate, but why walk to British India. Surely it must have crossed someone's mind to try to find the forces of Chaing Kai Shek and get transferred to the western powers operating in Eastern China. It would have saved them a lot of walking. You might say, Well he didn't want to risk hitting the Japanese or Chinese communists. But if they knew about the communists or the Japanese then they must also has known about a certain western presence and military support for China, or at least been able to find out about the political presence from someone). It might be hard to find someone who spoke a language they understood, but certainly worth looking for. 3) His climbing descriptions of the trails in the Himalayas bear no relationship to the real conditions and belie and true description of snow conditions in the Himalayas at the time of year he crossed into British India. Without maps or guides and adequate supplies, in the 1940s it was just not possible. Moreover they should have been picked up by either a Chinese Nationalist patrol or Nepalese govt. authorities long before they hit the British (where exactly he chances upon them is not mentioned -- we have no geographic details to crossreference his story. 4) He describees wandering around what is surely the Taklamantan Desert for 8 days without water. In this environment you'd be dead in 2 days, even if you were an SAS hardman with all the survival techniques in the world you would still be dead. 5) Perhaps the most damning indictment of his story is the fact that he was never debriefed by British intelligence, merely "given a new uniform and sent to Africa." What was his unit. The Polish contingent was also not in Africa, but battling up the boot of Italy. It is possible that he did join a British Unit, but since he states that his English was not good, it is unlikely the British would have assigned him with unit outside of the Polish contingent attached to the British 8th Army. It is stretching the boundaries of credibility to believe this man walks from a Stalinist labour camp across most of continental asia (an area where the British and Russians, though allies, have traditionally quarreled) comes crawling through to a British hospital and.... surprise, surprise, no official from British Intelligence debriefs him or his mates. Believe what you want, this is an interesting tale but as a betting man, I am sure it isn't true. As a piece of fiction it reads quite well. If you want good tales in the same genre read "Fear Drives My Feet." About the coast watchers behind Japanese lines, or the "Gulag Archipelago" to know what being in a Stalinist camp was really like. Those are real historical adventure.
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