"The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals." So wrote Aldous Huxley. Evgenia (Eugenia) Ginzburg's Journey Into the Whirlwind is a powerful memoir of one woman's descent, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to the rabble of men and women that were arrested, brutally interrogated and send to the Gulag in the Soviet Union during the great purges of the 1930s.Sergei Kirov's assassination in 1934 provided one of the pretexts for the great Soviet purges of the 1930s. The purges and great show trials began in earnest in 1937. Eugenia Ginzburg was a loyal party member, a teacher, and the editor of her local newspaper in Kazan, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. When she first heard of the mass arrests and imprisonments of loyal party members she was astonished that criminal elements had made their way into her party. This astonishment increased when she (and her husband) was arrested. As with thousands of other victims, Ginzburg was taken to jail, subjected to repeated interrogations and, over the course of the next year or so, traveled from prison to prison where the process of interrogation and mistreatment was continued. Ginzburg's memoirs in this volume continue through this initial imprisonment and her eventual transfer in cattle cars and a cargo ship to the frozen wasteland of Siberia. The second volume covers her years in exile, her Siberian reunion with her sole remaining son Vasily Aksyonov (a tremendous writer in his own right), and her eventual `rehabilitation'.There is a certain ineffable sadness to memoirs of the madness of the purges and the horrors of the Gulag. There is a numbing similarity in the descriptions of the deprivations, horrors, and, yes, stunning acts of grace and kindness experienced by those who lived to tell these tales. As Stalin once said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. So I think it may be difficult for a reader to become emotionally invested in a book of this sort once he or she acquires more than a passing knowledge of the purges and the Gulag. A certain protective detachment evolved for me after reading time and time again of life in the Gulag. Yet Eugenia Ginzburg's words were so compelling, so insightful, and so moving that this detachment was lifted. Reading this book became an emotional experience. One example. During the initial months of her imprisonment, prisoners were allowed to read only or two books a week. Ginzburg, loved both poetry and prose would take her allotted book and devour it, soaking up every word. She and her fellow prisoners would memorize and recite whole chapters of their favorite books. She tells us that this provided her with a level of reading comprehension that she never experienced before. Silly though it may seem, this heightened comprehension made me wish to revisit books I had already read just to see if it could gain more from them.Ginzburg writes with clarity and captures the lives and characters of her fellow prisoners and her captors with equal insight. Her look back at her years of imprisonment is not filled with bitterness. Her observations are more acute for their lack of self-pity. At one point Ginzburg explains that what kept her alive was not just fate but a will to survive "to live, to live no matter what." Reading Journey into the Whirlwind is both a humbling and ennobling experience.This is a wonderful book and I urge anyone with an interest in this subject or simply looking to see a person's life come to light via her memoirs to read Journey into the Whirlwind and the successor volume Within the Whirlwind.In addition, if Ginzburg's books leave you with a desire to read more accounts of life in the Soviet Union and the Gulag in the 1930s I recommend Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) and Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. Each book complements Ginzburg's exquisite memoirs.