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Reviews
Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag by Jan Tomasz Gross, Nicolas Werth, Steven Rendall
heeniee's review against another edition
3.0
not as many cannibals as i was led to believe.
said what it had to say and was fairly engrossed in the history behind it all.
said what it had to say and was fairly engrossed in the history behind it all.
magicsheep's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
bambiann's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Fact filled. Details and facts are laid out chronologically; events leading up to the Nazino affair, what happened on the island, and events afterwards. Reads like a history book not a novel.
srash's review against another edition
4.0
Very matter-of-fact, compact scholarly account of a horrifying incident in Soviet history--thousands of kulaks, convicts, and hapless urbanites deported to a Siberian island with few supplies in the early 1930s. Murder, cannibalism, and Lord of the Flies ensue.
Very polished translation from the French (with none of the awkward styling that plagued Farewell.) It would have been easy to sensationalize this, but the historian author is pretty measured and is most interested in the systematic failures that led to what happened, as well its chilling ramifications. Werth argues quite persuasively that this laid the groundwork for the horrors of the Great Purge a few years later.
It's a very dense book, despite its short length, that I feel like I'll have to reread to unpack everything in it. Still, a pretty gruesome read that introduced me to to the concept of "cannibal by habit," which will haunt my nightmares for a good long while.
Very polished translation from the French (with none of the awkward styling that plagued Farewell.) It would have been easy to sensationalize this, but the historian author is pretty measured and is most interested in the systematic failures that led to what happened, as well its chilling ramifications. Werth argues quite persuasively that this laid the groundwork for the horrors of the Great Purge a few years later.
It's a very dense book, despite its short length, that I feel like I'll have to reread to unpack everything in it. Still, a pretty gruesome read that introduced me to to the concept of "cannibal by habit," which will haunt my nightmares for a good long while.
daveroche's review against another edition
medium-paced
The first half of the book was a little dry but interesting. For a book called Cannibal Island, they really skimped on the cannibalism. I enjoyed that statistics, but I wanted something a little more... piquant. Don't judge me!
abarbu's review against another edition
1.0
An interesting story turned into a dry book about bureaucracy.
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