The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1

The book that shocked the world! The classic account of the Gulag! I deeply admire Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived several years of imprisonment and then interviewed hundreds of former inmates while lobbying the Soviet government to abandon its use of repression. The interviews and his own experiences form the basis of this three-volume book of over 1,500 pages (don’t worry—there’s an abridged edition!) that chronicles nearly every aspect of Stalin’s forced labor camps.

I love how Solzhenitsyn infuses his writing with righteous indignation—punctuated by dark humor—at what he and millions of others endured. I find him particularly effective at entering… show more.

I consider this one of the most important books about the 20th century. A document of the suffering of millions of people, with a clear message that people are capable of the most horrible evils, was conducted with the most precise bureaucratic consistency.

In the sense in which Hannah Arendt described evil as already a banal evil. However, this book has a clear catharsis regarding the trauma. The duty of humans is to preserve, nurture, and value the existence of every human, animal, plant, stone, and mineral, with the Earth as our home and the skies as our potential.