(Please note, this is not the more recent The Long Walk by Brian Castner.)
This discussion will open October 1.
Per Google:
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz is a harrowing memoir about a Polish cavalry officer who was captured by the Soviet Red Army in 1939, sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian Gulag, and escaped with six others in 1941 to walk roughly 4,000 miles to freedom in British India.
Mustich says:
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz (1915–2004)
Impossible to Put Down—But Impossible to Believe?
Since its publication at the height of the Cold War, Slavomir Rawicz’s account of his 1941 mid-blizzard escape from a Soviet labor camp in Siberia with six fellow prisoners has won legions of devoted readers. It is a chronicle of flight, endurance, and ultimate triumph against extraordinary odds: Poorly clothed, undernourished, on the brink of death, Rawicz and his companions braved the desolate Siberian tundra, icy rivers, the Himalayas, and the great Gobi desert on a four-thousand-mile trek to freedom that brought them to safety in India. They had no map and no compass, only an ax head, a homemade knife, and a fierce determination to survive; their suffering and courage dignify their astonishing, desperate adventure.
Although the veracity of the tale has been called into question based on recently released Soviet records and internal inconsistencies in the book itself (to say nothing of the party’s sighting of a pair of Yeti), Rawicz’s narrative remains an inspiring and unforgettable reading experience. Whether truth, fiction, or a little of both, The Long Walk is bound to be among the most amazing, heroic, and compelling stories you’ll ever read.
What: Adventure.
When: 1955.
Try: Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer. Endurance by Alfred Lansing. We Die Alone by David Howarth.
Adaptation: Peter Weir’s 2010 film, The Way Back, is based on the book.