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THE DAY WILL PASS AWAY

THE DIARY OF A GULAG PRISON GUARD: 1935-1936

A singular crack inside the gulag system.

First published in Russian in 2014, this is the first American edition of a chilling, revealing diary of a reluctant gulag prison guard.

Chistyakov, whose last entry appears on Oct. 17, 1936, and whom translator Tait informs us died at the front of Tula Province 1941, during “the first months of the war with Germany,” was an educated Muscovite who somehow fell afoul of the Russian secret police and was conscripted in October 1935 to guard prisoners in the Siberian gulag. This was a punitive position in the harsh region of the frozen taiga, and Chistyakov was designated as a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labor Camp, where creature comforts were few, escapes by the zeks (common criminals) frequent, and suspicions among officers rife. In her introduction, Irina Shcherbakova provides an informed sense of what the gulag system was all about: the importance of the strategic Baikal-Amur railway in the wake of Japanese occupation of Manchuria and takeover of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the need for cheap workers (unpaid forced labor) to live and work in these extreme conditions. Chistyakov’s diary entries reveal brutal details of his harsh living conditions, a sense of bewilderment at an educated man’s being stuck in such a wayward place with few literate people around him, shame at his sordid daily duties such as tracking down escapees, and ultimate despair about trying to find a way out. He even tendered a letter of resignation at one point, which was derided by the other officers, and contemplated suicide. While there are moments he found uplifting—a letter arriving, spring erupting, hunting, visiting the baths, editing the “wall newspaper”—his sympathy for the battered zeks gave way to his own sense of impending doom.

A singular crack inside the gulag system.

Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-68177-460-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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