Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive, dramatic and gripping study on Stalingrad
Review: I have read more history books than my wife can throw away. This one may be the best. It is well researched, well documented and written with tremendous style as well as analytical depth. Devoid of strong prejudice and the common desire to develop an historical thesis and then concentrate only on evidence which supports that thesis, this book maintains a gripping, yet intellectual approach to the Battle of Stalingrad. Its overall battle descriptions mixed in with foot soldier and officer accounts provide a comprehensive picture of this epic struggle. A great book for novices and experts alike.
Rating: 
Summary: The horror permeates the blur of detail
Review: What remains in my mind are the incidental points: German soldiers drowning in latrines, too weak from dysentary to rescue themselves or be rescued by starving comrades. Russians incinerated as they try to flee across the Volga. Mass cruelty mixed with a German clergyman painting a "Fortress Madonna" on the only available paper, the back of a military map. Soviet propagandists blaring "death tango" music across the front. The Russian truce seekers meeting with Germans after Christmas. Those on both sides who desert. Soviet POWs worked to death as human oxen. German letters home from the "kessel." Hitler's gambling with half a million lives and Goebbels' media manipulation. Stalin's NKVD and Hitler's Feldgendarmerie both shooting those terrified to fight. Everywhere, mud, ice, blood.These poignant and infuriating vignettes rise above the sheer mass of often primary-source material trawled by Beevor. Too often, this army formation goes here and this general goes there, especially in the middle of the narrative, and this weakens the "human" touch which I favor, although to be fair other readers may relish these strategic accounts. I certainly needed the maps to follow the action. When I was a child, a "Reader's Digest" condensation described Stalingraders eating library paste and boiling leather goods to survive. Surprisingly, the civilian plight gains very little attention; the focus here mixes wide-scale accounts of troop movements with accounts drawn from letters and documents. This is a difficult balancing act to carry off for simplifying a complicated story over a couple of years in four hundred pages, and I commend Beevor's skill while wishing nonetheless that the book was even longer, to allow more space between these two extremes, and more time to relate the dazzling or dreadful individual's story that illuminates the fog of war. A good companion to his "The Fall of Berlin," and those curious about the punishment batallions of the Soviets, the effect of the loss of the Sixth Army on the Nazi psyche, and the fate of those receiving Russian revenge for Nazi terror will find a logical continuation in his more recent work.
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