The Handmaid's Tale

4.5 NOTE: I did not watch the HBO show.
This is one great book. First of all - great storytelling. Really how the author managed to make it both thrilling, personal, show the world around and also give perspective to it is quite amazing. Most of the opinions I heard about it is how feminist it is. I actually see it more of a humanist manifesto. The fact that it is told from a woman's perspective makes us see the flaws of the current state of the world in a stronger light, but it does not focus only on that, showing how fanaticism, fundamentalism and totalitarianisms enslave societies and especially the weaker ones (take a look at the current, as of writing this review, BLM protests).
This is a story of a rotten, distopian world ruled by fear and fringe ideologies. The fact that it's really improbable for a revolution leading to such state to occur does not make the story any less ‘real'. It deals with a lot of dillemas similar to what prisoners of gulags or concentration camps had to go through to survive (e.g. A World Apart by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński).
I really enjoyed the whole book and will definitely re-read it some day.