
Long Walk to Freedom
1994 · 638 pages
Twenty-seven years in apartheid South Africa's prisons, set down without self-pity by the man who opened negotiations with his jailers from inside and then governed the country that had caged him.
★ 5.8

Twenty-seven years in apartheid South Africa's prisons, set down without self-pity by the man who opened negotiations with his jailers from inside and then governed the country that had caged him.

Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.