The Gulag Archipelago

Painful in so many ways. Not entirely comprehensible to a Western reader, but the rest is gut-wrenching and horrifying; possibly even a warning about what may be coming for the U.S. if the republicans have their way. I couldn't stop thinking about the lost humanity of the torturers and guards. How did they get that way? What happens to such monsters? And are we breeding a new set of those in our U.S. southern border?

I don't know if I'll be able to read Volume 2: “And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be ... worse.” (Spoiler alert: Volume 1—this one—is an unrelenting catalog of atrocities and cruelty; “worse” is hard to imagine.)