Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
For the non-fiction category Historical/Political, jammies' Fahrenheit 451 would like to pick The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn himself is not a particularly sympathetic character, and the books are definitely not light reading, yet I think they are and were important, even in an era where Stalinist Communism has been discredited (other than in North Korea), for the world they describe is the one where "the ends justify the means" has been taken to its furthest extreme and the inhabitants of that world are much the same whether Stalinist, nationalist, fundamentalist, or proponents of any other creed where the "elect" are separated from the "other".
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What do you mean Solzhenitsyn is not a particularly sympathetic character? In the book or in real life? He hardly ever appears in the volumes, most of the time he's talking about other people. I think that alone makes him sympathetic, the fact that he doesn't moan about his lot but rather describes the worse injustices that so many others endured.