From my Amazon review:
I would concur with the excellent reviews here. Without resorting to hagiography we get I think a pretty well rounded portrait of a man. A great writer no doubt, a flawed, intensely driven human being as well. Solzhenitsyn the Giant-Slayer of the USSR! This biography deserves 4 stars just for being attempted on such a great man but it is also very well-written, comprehensive and thoroughly researched so I give it 5. Not sure I would need to tackle Scammell's bio after this. Still after reading this it is hard to imagine what it might have been like to sit down and have a few beers with Sanya and talk about the good old days. Or the bad new days or whatever. Solzhenitsyn wrote a book in the 'Gulag' that without any doubt belongs on a list (top 10, 25, 50..whatever) of the most important books ever written. Maybe not the best, but name any book with more a more important subject...how you liquidate 60 million humans (and almost not get caught)! It defies all imagination in its horror. This was a very 'readable' work and I have new tremendous new insight into the author Solzhenitsyn. My next project in Russia..'November 1916'! My only wish is for a few more photos! Maybe of the various iconic locations where he wrote, dachas and even East Prussia or Estonia or the Gulag sites of his experience would have been incredible. ( )

"Superb...This is the most enlightening book on Solzhenitsyn's life and politics that is ever likely to appear" John Bayley

As DM Thomas states in his masterly biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "He helped to bring down the greatest tyranny the world has seen, besides educating the West as to its full horror. No other writer in our century has had such an influence on our history." The author of THE FIRST CIRCLE, CANCER WARD and THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO can truly be said to have altered Russia and thus the pattern of our times. This is as much a disturbing, haunting history of the twentieth century as it is a biography of a great novelist. Given the extraordinary language of Thomas and his novelistic gifts which he uses to render his story, this work will come to be regarded as one of the great biographies of recent decades. Particularly impressive is the vast cooperation of Solzhenitsyn's first wife, Natalya, who has provided an astonishing portrait of her ex-husband's life in Russia before his departure in 1974 from the then Soviet Union. The photographs which will be used for the book come from her own collection as well.