Selected Product:
| The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
Paperback
Author: Slavomir Rawicz
Publisher: The Lyons Press
Release Date: 2006-04-01
ISBN-10: 1592289444
ISBN-13: 9781592289448
List Price: $16.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
"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."--Slavomir Rawicz
In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk--a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday feats. Their march--over thousands of miles by foot--out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India is a remarkable statement about man's desire to be free.
While the original book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, this updated paperback version includes a new Afterword by the author, as well as the author's Foreword to the Polish book. Written in a hauntingly detailed, no holds barred way, the new edition of The Long Walk is destined to outrank its classic status and guaranteed to forever stay in the reader's mind.
Science says false but still a good read
| Customer Rating:  | Talk to any medical personnel about the length of time they spent without water in the Gobi desert and they will tell you it is physically impossible for even half the time described in the book. This fabrication along with the spotting of the abominable snowmen makes me think the book is longer on fiction than fact, although the premise may be absolutely true.
It was still an enjoyable read if inconsistent with reality. |
Endurance in another sense
| Customer Rating: | | It is amazing to find this book and to read so many reviews on it. I first read it when I was 10 years old, forty three years ago to be exact, and I have never forgotten it. I remember as a child being unable to put the book down and the images of swimming the Lena River and tramping through the Gobi Desert have stayed with me all this time. I would need to read it again (with the benefit of the experience of long distance running and a unit in Russian History) to ascertain whether this book could lay claim to reasonable accuracy or whether the survival adventures recounted are impossible as one reviewer has claimed. The believability of the survival notwithstanding, this book makes a great read. That I have remembered it all these years is surely testament to its story telling impact and its endurance. |
great book
| Customer Rating: | | I bought this for a friend. I read it a few years ago and loved it. |
The Long Walk
| Customer Rating: | | Well written, intense, story of survival, grief, pain and the courage of men hanging on for their freedom. Once started, you cannot put it down. |
A Mythic Tale
| Customer Rating: | The Long Walk is one of the greatest books I have ever read. The decades long battle over its authenticity is, I think, a testament to its power. Only a work of literature that brings such palpable reality to the reader could have withstood the firestorm of controversy surrounding it from so many corners.
Concerning its authenticity, I think there should be some humility shown on all sides. There are those who would desire to believe it simply because it is a great tale. Others would seek to "burst the bubble" of all involved out of a cynical doubt in the human capacity for greatness.
Several considerations should be made when considering the recently revealed documents disproving Rawicz's claims: 1. Rawicz' story is too detailed to have been entirely fabricated. Whether or not he himself participated in the events he describes is doubtful, but that the events themselves or something like them occurred is, in my mind, undeniable; 2. Placing a great deal of trust in Soviet documents from the Stalin era has never been a wise course to take. The fact that Rawicz, according to these documents, rejoined the Polish Army the day after he was released from the Gulag (remarkable considering the debilitating conditions he obviously suffered from in later life due to his imprisonment), make it seem a little too clean.
The most likely occurrence, in my own mind, is that Rawicz appropriated the story from a group of survivors who underwent a journey similar to the one he describes. The BBC article makes this clear:
"A clue may come from the story of Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India. In Calcutta in 1942, he interviewed three emaciated men, who claimed to have escaped from Siberia.
Mayne always believed their story was the same as that of The Long Walk - but telling the story years later, he could not remember their names. So the possibility remains that someone - if not Rawicz - achieved this extraordinary feat."
Whatever the case, the story Rawicz communicates possesses a majesty and power that can only belong to the annals of Truth. |
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