Books in Brief

The Russians, by Alex Percow (Greenwich, $2.75). This slender book is eloquent and terrifying. In an impressionistic rendering of life in the Soviet slave camp of Ouhto-Petchersk, jumping-off place for Vorkuta’s dreaded coal mines, Mr. Percow conveys all too clearly the reality behind the “chosen form of government” existing in the USSR. Not, of course, that anyone seriously considering the subject could by now have any doubt. But Mr. Percow’s novelistic skill—which at its best approaches Dostoevskian heights of fury and power—explodes that fact out of the realm of the abstract and into living realization. Recommended reading for those yearning co-existentialists now trying to push America into another Geneva conference.

C. LOGAN

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The Russians, by Alex Percow (Greenwich, $2.75). This slender book is eloquent and terrifying. In an impressionistic rendering of life in the Soviet slave camp of Ouhto-Petchersk, jumping-off place for Vorkuta’s dreaded coal mines, Mr. Percow conveys all too clearly the reality behind the “chosen form of government” existing in the USSR. Not, of course, that anyone seriously considering the subject could by now have any doubt. But Mr. Percow’s novelistic skill—which at its best approaches Dostoevskian heights of fury and power—explodes that fact out of the realm of the abstract and into living realization. Recommended reading for those yearning co-existentialists now trying to push America into another Geneva conference.

C. LOGAN