Library Journal Five centuries after demons and near humans ravaged the modern world, a group of survivors, made up of humans, as well as Elves and other magical races, have lived in safety behind a mystical barrier. When Panterra Qu and Prue Liss, young Trackers trained to watch the perimeter of their safe zone, discover that the barrier is breaking down and outside dangers threaten their home, they also realize that some of their leaders have an interest in not believing them. The two flee to the only ones who they know will listen-their distant cousins, the Elves. After chronicling the destruction of modern civilization in "The Word and the Void" series (Running with the Demon, A Knight of the Word, Angel Fire East) and "Genesis of Shannara" series (Armageddon's Children, The Elves of Cintra, The Gypsy Morph), Brooks now joins the two lines in this series opener, which lays the foundations for the original Shannara novels. A skilled storyteller and character builder, Brooks demonstrates an ability to bring together ancient magic and postmodern characters in a new look at his fantasy universe. VERDICT The author's fans should relish the coming together of two series into one dynamic whole. Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

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Publishers Weekly The horrors of a war-ravaged world again invade a hard-won peace in Brooks's intense follow-up to 2008's The Gypsy Morph. Five hundred years have passed since Hawk led a tattered band of survivors into a valley protected by a magical barrier. Now the wall has been breached by demons. The last known Knight of the Word, Sider Ament, wields a powerful black staff that he hopes to pass to a new leader. After rescuing talented teen Trackers Panterra Qu and Prue Liss, Sider asks them to warn the Children of Hawk. Unfortunately, their council leaders don't share Sider's certainty of an impending invasion. While Sider explores the other side of the barrier, the young Trackers find help from Arborlon Elves in this superlative Tolkien-style fantasy tweaked with a contemporary vibe. (Sept.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

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Book list Even before the book was out, its juiciest bits were everywhere: Sarah Palin was serene when chosen for V.P. because it was God's plan. Hillary didn't know if she could control Bill (duh). Elizabeth Edwards was a shrew, not a saint. Overall, the men from the campaign garner less attention in these anecdote wars than the women and tend to come off better but only just: Obama, the authors note, can be conceited and windy; McCain was disengaged to the point of recklessness; and John Edwards is a cheating, egotistical blowhard. But, hey, that's politics, and it's obvious that authors Heilemann (New York Magazine) and Halperin (Time) worked their sources well all 200 of them. Some (including the sources themselves) will have trouble with the book's use of quotes (or lack thereof). The interviews, according to the authors, were conducted on deep background, and dialogue was reconstructed extensively and with extreme care. Sometimes the source of a quote is clear, as when the book gets inside someone's head, but not always. Many of the book's events were covered heavily at the time (Hillary's presumed juggernaut; Michelle Obama's initial hostility to her husband's candidacy), but some of what this volume delivers is totally behind-the-scenes and genuinely jaw-dropping, including the revelation that senators ostensibly for Clinton (New York's Chuck Schumer) pushed hard for Obama. Another? The McCain camp found Sarah Palin by doing computer searches of female Republican officeholders. A sometimes superficial but intensely readable account of a landmark campaign (librarians take note: the exceedingly flimsy binding may reflect the publisher's haste to rush the book to press).--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Book list We have massive amounts of data about the Nazi concentration and death camps, ranging from memoirs of survivors to incredibly detailed records kept by Nazi officials. The Nazi camps lasted just over a decade. On the other hand, the vast system of confinement, forced labor, and executions dubbed the "Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn lasted almost 70 years, and we are just beginning to get a comprehensive picture of this affront to the human spirit. Applebaum is a former Marshall scholar and is now a journalist who covered the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual opening of KGB archives, the full horror of the Gulag is gradually emerging, and Applebaum has done a masterful job of chronicling the origin, growth, and eventual end of this monstrous system. Contrary to the beliefs of many, the Gulag was not a product of the Stalin era. Both Lenin and Trotsky staunchly backed the creation of these camps as a useful tool in their promotion of "Red Terror." Under Stalin, of course, the camps were greatly expanded, both as a repository for the victims of his various purges and as a vital component, via slave labor, in industrialization. Like the Nazi camps, the Gulag became a virtual industrial complex. Now, we are left with the evidence, the memory of survivors, and the moral obligation to uncover the full story. This brilliant and often heartbreaking work is a giant step in the fulfillment of that obligation. --Jay Freeman

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Publishers Weekly Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion. By the gulag's peak years in the early 1950s, there were camps in every part of the country, and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product (chairs, lamps, toys, those ubiquitous fur hats) and some of the country's most important science and engineering (Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program, began his work in a special prison laboratory). Applebaum details camp life, including strategies for survival; the experiences of women and children in the camps; sexual relationships and marriages between prisoners; and rebellions, strikes and escapes. There is almost too much dark irony to bear in this tragic, gripping account. Applebaum's lucid prose and painstaking consideration of the competing theories about aspects of camp life and policy are always compelling. She includes an appendix in which she discusses the various ways of calculating how many died in the camps, and throughout the book she thoughtfully reflects on why the gulag does not loom as large in the Western imagination as, for instance, the Holocaust. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

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Library Journal Subsequent to Solzhenitsyn's landmark Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Applebaun, former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and currently on the editorial staff at the Washington Post, has captured the full brutality and economic engine for the Soviet state that was the Gulag prison system. This book is perfectly timed to follow such recent works as Golfo Alexopoulos's Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State 1926-1936. With a finely honed writer's skill, Applebaum thoroughly describes in minute detail the system of camps, the prisoners, camp administration, camp life, and Stalin's obsession with slave labor. "GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word `Gulag' has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself." Intellectually, Americans and Western Europeans know roughly what happened in the Soviet Union, but the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of the Third Reich. This first complete history of the Gulag system not only points out the similarities with the Nazis and their concentration camps but also puts Stalin and his Gulag on the same ghastly level. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/02.]-Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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Library Journal More than a full-scale history of the Soviet Gulag, this work by the Spectator's deputy editor asks why it is so little remembered in both Russia and the West. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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