One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962 ★★★★

Life Under Article 58

The usual superlatives one wishes to bestow upon One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich fall away after one finishes reading it. Is it fair to describe as a statement to hidden hope, or of the irreducible dignity of man?

It sure doesn't feel that way when you finish it. Hardship is endured, yes, but hardly the ennobling kind.

What One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich does get across rather well is the human instinct for survival. It's all our protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, has left to him as we join him in his Soviet prison camp on a winter day early in 1951.

The Brethren – Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong, 1979 ★★★★½

Courting History

Like the Cosa Nostra and the Vatican, the U. S. Supreme Court is an institution of vast influence which nevertheless gets to operate largely under the media radar. It isn't often one gets to peak behind the curtain.

Give authors Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong points for not just getting such exclusive access, but using it so well.

Covering the years 1969 to 1975, The Brethren documents a time of significant transition, both on the Court and in the wider sphere of American life.

Sackett's Land – Louis L'Amour, 1974 ★½

Weak Start to Sackett Series

Louis L'Amour is commonly called the most popular novelist of the 20th century, with some 260 million books sold by century's end. But he wasn't critically well-regarded, and there are times reading him you understand why.

Sackett's Land presents him in surprisingly weak form given the pride of place this novel enjoys in his oeuvre.