All the great prison memoirs spawned by Russia's cruel history are alike in essence. From Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and now Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil, they reveal a world of unrelenting human degradation: the bestiality of the jailers, the dog-eat-dog struggle among the prisoners, the treachery of the informers. Each account evokes the stench, the rattle of fetters, the heart-stopping cold, the killing hard labor. Still, each author used different stratagems to survive, to prevail as a human being and, ultimately, to bear witness.
To this enormous task Sharansky brought uncommon...