Just Send Me Word
by Orlando Figes
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
93%
Critic Reviews: 20
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
76%
Reader Ratings: 12
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Synopsis
A heroic love story and an unprecedented inside view of one of Stalin's most notorious labor camps, based on a remarkable cache of letters smuggled in and out of the Gulag"I went to get the letters for our friends, and couldn't help but feel a little envious, I didn't expect anything for myself. And suddenly—there was my name, and, as if it was alive, your handwriting."In 1946, after five years as a prisoner—first as a Soviet POW in Nazi concentration camps,... more
About Orlando Figes
- All Critics: 20
- Positive: 19
- Negative: 1
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The Independent | 19 May 2012
These letters give him ample opportunity to remind any remaining doubters of his talents, however, and sometimes they are so moving that he quotes them in full, with minimal commentary.
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Mail Online | 21 Jun 2012
Orlando Figes melds together this story with a sensitivity and mastery of detail which few historians could match.
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The Telegraph | 28 May 2012
Figes, in his impeccable presentation of their story and its context, brings out how they “lived in a dual world of belief and doubt”.
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The Guardian | 19 May 2012
Just Send Me Word, grimly absorbing, conveys the pity of the Stalinist Gulag with integrity and proper sympathy.
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The Guardian | 30 May 2012
...a uniquely detailed narrative of the gulag...
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The Daily Beast | 10 Jun 2012
Figes, in Just Send Me Word, brings us closer to an understanding of the horror Stalin’s victims went through, in their own words.
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Kirkus Reviews | 15 Mar 2012
A heart-rending record of extraordinary human endurance.
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Christian Science Monitor | 25 May 2012
The result is Just Send Me Word, a remarkable love story intertwined with a rare glimpse into a harsh chapter of Soviet history.
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Boston.com | 31 May 2012
...an enchanting marvel that reacquaints our technologically sophisticated but verbally deficient world with the power of the epistle to sustain love in the most trying of circumstances.
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Star Tribune | 9 Jun 2012
"Just Send Me Word" is a heroic, absolutely astounding love story told through the letters of Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanova, who met as students in the 1930s.
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Historical Novel Review | 20 Jul 2012
This book is a shocking revelation about the harsh conditions and the tens of millions of lives lost because of the Soviet Communists.
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Spectator Book Club | 2 Jun 2012
...a book which depicts with unusual intimacy the private lives of two people living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, while simultaneously telling the more universal story of what we would nowadays call a long-distance relationship.
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Washington Independent Review of Books
Details of Lev’s and Sveta’s busy lives and constructs of their parallel civilizations make this a necessary read for any historian of the era as well as the random politico-cultural voyeur.
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Historical Novel Society | 1 Aug 2012
Tender, yearning, but also heartbreakingly frustrated, this is a very human perspective on a dark slice of history.
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Financial Times | 26 May 2012
It is impossible to read without shedding tears.
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We Love This Book
Ultimately, though, this is a gripping story of the lives of two people who, against all the odds, keep their devotion alive.
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The Jewish Chronicle | 3 Aug 2012
Figes, a considerable scholar of Communist Russia, evokes a heart-rending vision of the individual pitted against two totalitarian systems.
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Macleans | 20 Jul 2012
...it’s the first-rate narrative historian, and not the academic greasy pole climber, on display in Just Send Word.
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Standpoint | 1 May 2012
Just Send Me Word contains few surprises for veterans of Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov, and could have been a little shorter...
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