"This brave, courageous, and heroic man who spoke and wrote the truth to power at great risk to himself discovered that he was ''between two millstones'' in Russia and the West. Russia has never had a greater, more devoted patriot than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." -- New York Journal of Books "When you read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn you know that you are reading and being read by one of the greatest men of the bloody 20th century. He wouldn''t be muzzled. He is also frank. Solzhenitsyn never hesitated to reveal to his readers the truth of things, including his own soul." -- The American Conservative "Solzhenitsyn covers Russian history, corruption in the Soviet Union, and the vacuity of Western culture alongside humorous anecdotes about friends and acquaintances. Each page pulses with intellectual rigor and life energy.

It becomes difficult to imagine how Russian literature, and the world''s view of life inside of the Soviet Union, would be without the undying devotion and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." -- Foreword Reviews (starred review) "[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat with Natalia, his wife and intellectual partner, and three sons, the Nobel laureate found . ''a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.''" -- Kirkus Reviews "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--perhaps the most significant literary exile since Dante--is a figure of incalculable importance to world history. Yet in these pages, we enter into the life and times not of an austere statue or a respectable oil portrait but of a flesh-and-blood Russian patriot struggling to defend his vision and his humanity amid the loneliness of his American exile and the remorseless grinding of two rival empires. Between Two Millstones, Book 2 is not only an invaluable addition to Solzhenitsyn studies but also an intimate self-portrait of the great-souled man." --Rod Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies "In these pages, readers meet one of the great men of the twentieth century.

Exiled, misunderstood, and often attacked, Solzhenitsyn drew courage from his devotion to truth, his loyalty to his vocation as a writer, and his indomitable belief in the dignity of the Russian people." --R. R. Reno, editor-in-chief, First Things "This is a happy book. An epic of small spaces, great issues, and large accomplishments, the concluding volume of Between Two Millstones covers the years 1978 to 1994, when Solzhenitsyn was living on his beloved Vermont property. At the heart of the memoir lies a touching portrait of his wife Natalia. Between Two Millstones is enlivened by the author''s impressions of famous figures like Andrei Sakharov, Heinrich Böll, Margaret Thatcher, and Princess Diana." --Richard Tempest, author of Overwriting Chaos "The Solzhenitsyn forcibly deported to Germany in 1974 now faces a disconcertingly gaudy array of Western images and effigies of himself.

In characteristically vivid and pugnacious vein he tells of twenty years of exile--storm-tossed between the snarling Soviet Scylla and the vertiginous frustrations and perils of this Western Charybdis--nursing the seemingly forlorn hope that he might yet end his days in his homeland. A gripping read!" --Michael Nicholson, co-editor of Solzhenitsyn in Exile " Between Two Millstones provides a unique peek into Solzhenitsyn''s life in Cavendish, a small rural Vermont town whose people collectively chose to keep the location of his home a secret from the prying eyes of the press and the curious. This compelling memoir answers some of the locals'' own questions about life behind Solzhenitsyn''s chain-link fence and provides a glimpse into how it was possible for him to conduct research and to write in such a remote location." --Margaret Caulfield, director, Cavendish Historical Society "The Solzhenitsyn who emerges in Between Two Millstones is no longer the triumphant and ebullient fighter we saw in The Oak and the Calf . Though ready for battle as ever, his assurance in the efficacy of his word is shaken not only by Westerners with their deeply embedded biases but also by his own countrymen who turn a deaf ear to his warnings. A great read!" --Alexis Klimoff, coauthor of The Soul and Barbed Wire "If Solzhenitsyn did not welcome exile, if he felt torn, as always, between the two millstones of the Soviet ''Dragon'' . and an uncomprehending and increasingly hostile West, he nonetheless found solitude and happy refuge in his eighteen years in Cavendish, Vermont. It was there that he worked on, and eventually finished, his other great work of historical and literary investigation, The Red Wheel .

Eventually Solzhenitsyn would be . the enemy of Sovietism par excellence , . the last major anti-Communist writer to appear in print." --Daniel J. Mahoney, from the foreword "We know Solzhenitsyn the prisoner of the Gulag and the survivor of cancer. We know Solzhenitsyn the Russian patriot and resolute foe of the tyranny that deformed his country. In the second volume of Between Two Millstones we meet Solzhenitsyn the husband and father, Solzhenitsyn the writer. Here we meet a great soul overcoming not crisis but the quotidian, the banal, the small, a Solzhenitsyn for anyone who struggles against the enervating drag of the ordinary in our culture of distraction.

" --Will Morrisey, author of Churchill and de Gaulle.