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"The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

book review by Riley Burnham 10/6/2023

hot garbage; horror-fiction; akin to 1984

i'd have bailed on this ~22 hour slog well into the first chapter -- even the intro(!), except i felt inspired to at least write the review; so made it through, albeit on high-speed

we are gloriously given this book of heinous actions, on-&-on-&-on, for what may be a Nobel Prize-winning sob-story [also, trash like this indicates the Nobel Prize is basically entertainment]

hard to take much/any of this seriously; given i view that war as mostly theater anyhow

​​​​​​​so i guess the 0 tears/rivers i shed while listening to the endless tortures of fellow humans [yea right] makes me evil or something -- or more likely a little keen on the [i think military intelligence] script-writing here by a guy w/ an almost certainly fabricated name [check the etymology of Solzhenitsyn -- seems to have been conjured in the 50s for this guy]

all said, glad it's over

actually, since this was the abridged version [thank God], i'm going to at least sample Volume 1 before moving on