[at-l] book recommendation

[gaudet@mediaone.net (Arthur Gaudet)]

The full title in case you're looking for it is:

The Long Walk: the True Story of a Trek to Freedom , by Rawicz, Slavomir

I read this in March '98 just after my '97 thruhike and was 
fascinated by just how long a walk a person could do, under arduous 
circumstances. Slavomir was force marched from a train depot to a 
gulag in Siberia (WWII period) for several hundred miles, then 
managed an escape and then walked to India, crossing a desert and 
then the Himalayan Mountains. Several of his companions died in the 
long walk. An interesting sidenote to his story: on the long walk he 
decides to bypass Lhasa (where he could obtain supplies and rest) 
because it was thought to be full of Germans. For those who read 
Harrar's "Seven Year's in Tibet" it's pretty clear that he'd have 
been welcome and taken care of. He most certainly would've met Harrar.

More recently I'm reading Arlene Blum's account of the 1978 climb of 
Annapurna, first 8000 meter peak done by an all women team. In the 
update she states that a few years later, in 1982, she completed a 
2000 mile walk across the Himalayan regions of Bhutan, Nepal and 
India.

>To those of you on the list who recommended Slavomir Rawicz' 'The Long
>Walk', I just had Valerian Ivanovich Albanov's 'In The Land Of The White
>Death : An Epic Story Of Survival In The Siberian Artic' out from the
>library. Very much in the vein of the Shackleton books and 'The Long Walk',
>and also a very fast read.... (too fast, really) highly recommended...

-- 
Arthur D. Gaudet         	"Is walking down called hiking, too?"
(RockDancer)  	                 -heard at the top of Mt Washington, NH