A Must-Read

If you’re going to write books for a living, you have to make up your mind not to pay any attention to reviews of your work. But I doubt that I will ever manage to feel indifferent to reviews of my friends’ books—especially not to one as peevishly ungenerous as The New Yorker’s review (dated April 14) of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Gulag: A History.

I read Gulag in galleys a few weeks ago. It is, simply, a titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. Gulag is the first book in English to compile the whole mass of knowledge about the Soviet prison-camp system. That system was created within weeks of the inauguration of the Soviet state, in 1917, and it lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself. In all, perhaps as many as 18 million people passed through its camps. And yet, even now, the Gulag is not well understood in the West.

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David Frum

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you’re going to write books for a living, you have to make up your mind not to pay any attention to reviews of your work. But I doubt that I will ever manage to feel indifferent to reviews of my friends’ books—especially not to one as peevishly ungenerous as The New Yorker’s review (dated April 14) of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Gulag: A History.

I read Gulag in galleys a few weeks ago. It is, simply, a titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. Gulag is the first book in English to compile the whole mass of knowledge about the Soviet prison-camp system. That system was created within weeks of the inauguration of the Soviet state, in 1917, and it lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself. In all, perhaps as many as 18 million people passed through its camps. And yet, even now, the Gulag is not well understood in the West.