In the powerful tradition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Bitter Winds chronicles a brave man's triumph over mindless brutality and unimaginable oppression. On April 27, 1960, Harry Wu, a senior at Beijing's Geology Institute, was arrested by Chinese authorities and, without ever being formally charged or tried, spent the next nineteen years in hellish prison labor camps. Exiled to the bitter desolation of this extensive gulag, he was transformed from a member of China's privileged intellectual elite into a pariah, a faceless cipher denied even the most basic human rights. He was subjected to grinding labor, systematic starvation, and torture, yet he refused to give up his passionate hold on life.

Online resource; title from ePub title page (Digitalia, viewed July 3, 2018)