I bought this book with my Audible credits a couple of months back. I finally got around to listening to it. I had put it off, because it was a 20+ hour listen.

I knew barely anything about gulags until this book. Mostly, my knowledge was that people were sent to these prisons for basically any kind of reason, real or imagined. They were starved and tortured, and it was a hard existence. A lot of people never left, and a lot that did were broken people in more than one way. This book offered a really comprehensive look at the structure of a gulag, the experiences people endured or were likely to endure, and the means of incarceration. I learned so much from this book. I think having read this will really put the books about personal accounts of those who experienced the gulag have a greater impact and more context.