This is a beautifully done book with exceptional illustrations. It has a magical feel to it that really will intrigue the child as well as the adult. It is perfect for girl or boy readers because of its classic fairy tale storyline. Loved it, and so did my son!

Tales of Ivan Belkin is the breaking point in Pushkin's creative work. It's the border between Sentimentalist literature and Realistic one. The characters are much deeper than they could be looked for the first time! Tales of Ivan Belkin are something about a JOKE OF GENIUS, don't you see that? They all are about things that were important for the author in this horrible autumn, 1830, when they were written. These things are family, friendship, and love. Each tale is full of love, don't you think so?

I want to know where in his writings does he treat fairly extensively the "acquiring of a second skin" as a result of being absorbed into the Gulag? I have found a very brief reference in the glossary of my old paperback translation from the early eighties. I know in years past that I read a more extensive treatment of this topic, but scanning of all his major works except August 1914 (which I have not read) and Cancer Ward (which I have read, but the local library does not have a copy) has not turned up this reference. Please someone help in this matter!

Clear and compelling indictment of the most inhuman social system devised by humans. This account of the Soviet Union's history illustrates the danger of a one party system and the inhumanity of big government.

I returned to this slim volume following the Sept. 11 attacks. While America is now said to be fighting "terrorism," few have pointed out the similarities between terrorism and our old foe communism. Reading Solzhenitsyn is at once alarming and comforting. In reading these words, now a quarter of a century old, it is not at all a stretch to apply them to our present situation. He writes: "I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust to prevent those pundits who are attempting to establish fine degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality (some because of their distorted outlook, others because of short-sightedness, still others out of self-interest)to prevent them from using the struggle for peace and social justice to lead you down a false road. They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat -- one which has never before been seen in the history or the world. Not only in the history of the country, but in the history of the world." This treatise had a monumental effect on me when I was in college, helping to shape much of my politics. Going back and re-reading it, I find that its content is as powerful and as applicable as ever. To boot, Solzhenitsyn writes with a sense of urgency that is uniquely Russian -- he is similar to Dostoevsky in that way -- and, like Dostoevsky, for having been in the Gulag, his words ring powerfully, indeed. A wonderful companion volume to this would be his Nobel lecture (he won the Nobel for literature in 1970), where in speaking about writing and art, he says, "One word of truth outweighs the world." In short, he is one of the most important thinkers/writers of the century. It is disheartening that these speeches are out of print.

Solzhenitsyn at his crazy best. An all-out attack on both the Soviet Union and the American youth of the 1970's, this more or less accurately reflects the real Solzhenitsyn: A self-centered angry man who attempts to take the sins of the world upon himself. Is this simply hubris, or the act of a boddhisattva in the making? You decide.

Naftali and Fursenko have done a excelent piece of research in this interesting book about the Cuban Missile Crisis. In particular, they highlight the close to insane policies of the Russian Government as they sought to bolster the Cuban regime from US attack. This book gives the whole picture including the bay of pigs and other US misadventures that drove Castro into the Soviet orbit. The most fascinating section for me was the part on Castro and way he was compelled to adopt Soviet style communism. The US simply did not leave him any choice. A balanced look at high powered diplomacy that had gone mad.

It was frightening to live through the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a little kid but still recall how scared and tense my parents and teachers were: an all-pervasive feeling of dread. I'm sure today's children feel the same about 9-11-01, and in future years they may have memories about this September's tragedy similar to mine about those 13 days in 1962.

Fursenko and Naftali have done an admirable and thorough job detailing the rise of Castro and Cuban-American-Soviet relations during that period. It was overdue, since classics such as Graham Allison's Essence of Decision did not have the benefit of access to Soviet archives. The one criticism I have is that the authors almost overwhelm you with facts at the expense of interpretation. I didn't, for example, get a good sense of exactly why Fidel threw his lot in with the Soviets back in '60 when it was clear Moscow intended to keep Cuba going as a sugar colony--only at less than world prices!

(...)

In One Hell of a Gamble, Fursenko and Naftali cut to the heart of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the surrounding politics. Due to the end of the Cold War, they were able to obtain many first-hand accounts of the superpower rivalry from the participants themselves. Using this newfound knowledge, they craft a timeless account of the behind-the-scenes politics that formed the backbone of US-Soviet relations during the Kennedy era. A chilling perspective is offered on how close the world really came to nuclear annihilation in the fall of 1962. Congrats to Fursenko and Naftali for producing a gripping work that I highly recommend to all students of the Cold War or politics in general.

Surely, unless you happen to be a student or author planning to regurgitate the work of others, the interest in history is not in a parade of dates and names, but in world-shaping events and the people behind them. In this sense Toland's book is in a better tradition.
I have read several books on Hitler. The least useful ones are the high profile date and name books by Bullock and Kershaw and I advise the reader without academic motivation to avoid them as too dry or making shallow interpretations of the man. In fact one can only wonder at the whole business of making books by only reading books, in comparison to eyewitness testimony of Toland interviews.
Nevertheless, despite the books biographical use this is not quite a work of psychological explanation and I strongly recommend George Victor's "Hitler: the search for the origins of his evil", a book I have complete confidence in, to supplement a basic command of Hitler biography like this. My criticism of Toland's book therefore is that it may well be longer than is necessary for your needs of studying men over events, but it has plenty of early Hitler biography and is more reliable than a shorter work of the ironic and entertaining Robert Payne.

Historian John Toland's "Adolf Hitler" stands as the greatest of the many works that have been published about the 20th Century's most fascinating and diabolical leader. Toland doesn't content himself by merely reporting the facts, rather he makes a real effort to get inside the man's head and determine how he came to be such an explosive package of brilliance and insanity. The story of Hitler the man is so improbable that had this been a work of fiction, no one would have found it plausible. He was a self-man who, against all odds, seized absolute power in a Europe in which until his own adulthood, heredity usually dictated one's station in life.

Though daunting at over 100 pages, Toland has a good stroytelling touch, making the book quite readble. Toland thoroughly chronicles Hitler's life, from his abused upbrining, through his service in the First World War, to his rise as a young politician, and finally his seizure of power and all the evil that followed. The book is generously sprinkled with photographs and other illustratins to help the reader.

Overall, an outstanding historical biography that is as monumental as its subject.

It is easy to write off Adolf Hitler as a monster, or a man of pure evil, but these labels only serve to hide what Hitler truly was- A human being. John Toland's facinating biography is must reading for anyone interested in just how one man could be responsible for such horror. From dispelling myths surrounding the death of Hitler's niece, Geli Raubal, and his involvment in the Reichstag fire, to his ghastly orders to carry out the final solution, we see Hitler the man. And while his motives often times seem unthinkable, Toland nevertheless manages to convey the feelings and emotions that led to Hitler's unrelenting policies of destruction. What truly makes this work remarkable is Toland's presentation of the facts seemingly without bias. The facts are presented as they happened and the reader is left free to come to thier own conclusions. For decades people the world over have tried to understand the madness of Nazi Germany. Toland's biography will no doubt educate and help to give a measure of understanding to anyone who reads it. Truly a great work.

Stalin held the Soviet Union in a grip of terror from 1941 until he died (or, some are now saying, was murdered) in 1953. Among the atrocities that were always suspected were the existence of brutal Siberian prisons. In 1963, Alexander Solzhenitzyn's novel, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, was published in America and around the world, revealing the realities of these experiences.

As much as the book makes an important statement of the political and social conditions of the era, it is also a wonderful work of literature. In a direct, spare style, the author goes through the minutiae of daily life from the perspective of one man, the title character who is mostly called Shukhov in the book. Like the other prisoners, Shukhov is not in for crime as we define it in America; his crime was to have been unlucky enough during World War II to be taken as a POW. Another prisoner's crime was to have received a small token of appreciation after the war from a British soldier. The brutalities they experience in their prison are not those commonly associated with contemporary American incarceration. Insufficient clothing, insufficient food and insufficient bedding in a remote arctic setting are just the beginning. They have nothing else. Work on building a "community" is only called off if the temperature goes lower than 42 degrees below zero. The men are given insufficient tools and supplies but are expected under threat to complete the building process in record time. On the one hand, the author writes, your worst enemy is the man next to you because you are both scrambling for the same meager scraps. At the same time, though, the dynamics of the system require that you give your allegiance to the gang. Many of the boss jobs are given to prisoners which yields another revelation about Stalin's world: the wall between prisoner and paid staff was very thin. Another: in the brief flashbacks of life outside the prison, there are struggles and inadequacies as well, no one has it easy. And another: the prisoners have one advantage that no one else in the USSR has, the freedom to communicate candidly without threat; what else can be done to those already living the life of punishment? At the end of the day, Shukhov is thrilled: he has caged a few extra scraps of food during the day and did nothing that would cause him to be thrown into solitary confinement of which he is most afraid.

My chief test of fiction is, does the author create an airtight world, using it to explicate universal truths of the human condition? ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH succeeds brilliantly. It is very readable, much like THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, and while it profiles a terrible life, it also emits a spirituality that arises from the specter of men who find something to be grateful for at the end of the day, even if it is an extra crust of stale bread or the fact that in the last 24 hours, they did nothing, however innocently, however not their own fault, that would get them sent to solitary confinement.

Solzhenitsyn's first book is a stark description of life in a Siberian prison camp. The protagonist, a WWII POW, is accused of spying for the Nazis and sentenced to 10 years of forced labor. The story is at its best in the matter-of-fact approach by which Ivan Denisovich Shukhov describes a typical day. The reader is not subjected to tales of brutality or beatings. Even fears of the effects of countless days in a dehumanizing environment seem to take a back seat to the mundane challenges of daily life in the gulag. Shukhov's description of meal time is a good example: "... their bowl of hot and watery soup without any fat was like rain in a drought. They gulped it down. They cared more for this bowlful than freedom, or for their life in years gone by and years to come."

Solzhenitsyn's message is clear. Humility is easily stripped away under oppressive regimes, and survival becomes the end game. Only the strongest can hope to retain their dignity, and even they will eventually lose that battle as the years go by. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is a great intro to Russian literature, and a poignant account of post-war life in a Stalinist gulag.

There is a saying that today,the day we spent in vain, is the

day which the people,who died yesterday, desperately hoped to

see. We should be fully aware of the value of "one day" reading

this book.

This book describes the overall life in a jail, which is not

better or worse than that of other prisoners. As Ivan is the

most common name of Russia, his life in the jail is as ordinary

as his name. Those who have never been to Russia or read the

contemporary literature might say that the story is too

exagerated. However nothing is a lie of false. This is the

actual life that any Russian prisoner would have overcome at

the time.

All fight for their own life:food. Prisoners are eager to

steal others' bread or soup by instinct in order to survive.

Their goal is to eat as much as possible just to get out of the

jail alive. And that is their life at the same time. The

struggle for a piece-not a loaf-of bread is the survival fight.

It is definitely not because they hate each other or so.

Besides, although the atmosphere is always tense and

oppressed, those prisoners do keep their conscience and care

for others. Perhaps what Dostoevsky tried to tell is that under

the worst circumstances do people still have their own dignity

and humanity. However, we seem to lose them in this very

comfortable and wealthier world.

One day may be very short for ordinary people yet it is so

precious to others, such as to prisoners. While reading, I,

time to time, thought, 'how come a day is so long that it takes

a whole book to describe it?' But as soon as finishing it, I

was surprised that somebody's day could be felt so short to me.

My professor assigned homework in Russian Literature lecture;to

describe 5 or 10 minites from my day. My 5 minutes were

drastically long to write.

In this book hides human breath and dignity, even though it

merely seems to show the horrible, harsh life in jail.

Regardless how hard the conditions are, people would not lose

the dignity that Solzhenitsyn taught us from this book.