Review: Spies in Beirut, interrogation, the Yukon gulag and the long way home
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 20, 2014
If you want to know about totalitarian regimes and their methods, read the book. It moves fast and the vivid descriptions will keep you glued to the page. Not for the faint-hearted.Spoiler Alert:This book is very different from "Dynamite Fishermen". It starts kind of the same with spies and agents in Beirut but then ends up with interrogation, torture and a long stay in an American Gulag in the Yukon and an even longer trip through the frozen wasteland on the way home.The  interrogation and show trial is mind numbing. Old soviet style with deprivation, torture, hunger and drugs. You get stripped of all humanity and you wonder how anybody can survive it.The description of the Yukon Camp is direct and factual. A mixture of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags where the inmates slowly are stripped of any residual humanity by forced hard labor, insufficient food and unbelievable cold.Escape from the camp seems impossible. But you have to try. You will die shortly anyway. That part of the story reminded me of The Long Walk (1955), a book by Sławomir Rawicz later made into the film The Way Back in 2010. If you like this book you try the movie.I gave the book 5 stars for an intricate story with vivid descriptions and few dull moments. Great read.