Word: lane
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Books: A Dull Brick Lane...
...Books: A Dull Brick Lane...
...Books: A Dull Brick Lane...
...history, or the work of other zeks (prisoners) here. Few Muscovites know of their contribution, and even fewer seem to care. Perhaps the sheer scale of the horror makes ordinary Russians uncomfortable. Anne Applebaum, in her meticulously documented and dispassionately written Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Penguin/Allen Lane; 610 pages), estimates that 18 million people passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953. Nobody knows how many died, though she offers, "reluctantly" the almost certainly low official figure of 2.7 million camp deaths. This does not include those who died in the other chapters of Soviet terror...
This review is written by an Asian living in Britain, a point worth mentioning because it may help explain why I found Monica Ali's Brick Lane (Doubleday; 413 pages) as dull as dhal. For those with no personal experience of the book's central milieu - London's Bangladeshi community - it might seem a spicy treat, full of colorful, richly detailed characters and aromatic atmospherics. Indeed most British reviewers have greeted it with effusive praise, many of them endorsing Granta's selection of Ali as one of Britain's 20 best young novelists. But if you've grown...