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Summary: Stalingrad
Review: Excellent book. Incredible battle. Well narrated. Painful to read at times due to the subject matter. What Hell everyone went through! May God have mercy on them. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in WWII.
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Summary: Moving and humbling account of a great battle
Review: Simply one of the most definative books on Stalingrad. The account leaves you wanting to seek warmth and comfort when you realise the experiences that are covered in the book.The writing is easily readable and yet covers the topic in detail without causing one to be numbed by excessive facts. A great book that deserves a place on your shelf.
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Summary: The Greatest Book On Stalingrad
Review: Antony Beevor's amazing book takes us into the heart and soul of the battle of Stalingrad and by the end I was blown away by it all. Beevor provides us with meticulous research and personal accounts on the subject. Every aspect of the battle is covered in detail. It is a remarkable and humbling story and Beevor tells it with professionalism and intellectualism. The book explores the war on the sides of both parties. We find out what led to the battle, its outcome and the aftermath. This allows us to fully understand the magnitude and vitality of this battle. Using his widespread knowledge, Beevor gives us an interpretation of each event so that his text becomes more meaningful. Stalingrad The Fateful Siege is wonderful and informative read, which reaches to all aspects of the war. It is an amazing book and I highly recommend it to you.
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Summary: Gripping stuff
Review: Antony Beevor's account of Hitler's biggest mistake and (possibly) World War Two's greatest battle is a riveting read. Rarely have I come across a text which has gripped my imagination and haunted me with equal vigour. The scale of the struggle and the blunders - on each side - was immense. Russia's mistreatment of its own soldiers was almost unfathomable. Almost 13,000 Russians were shot by their own side for desertion or for showing signs of cowardice (whatever that might have meant). The extent of Hitler's megalomania comes to light right at the beginning and shines ever more brightly as the battle progresses. By the end, you realise he was little more than uneducated fool who didn't give a stuff for the armies of volunteers and conscripts that fought on his behalf. Hitler's generals, Von Paulus in particular, seem to have been totally hamstrung by their leader's ever changing battle plans. Their Russian counterparts suffered the same difficulties at the hands of their great leader - although in the end the battle appears to have been won by theatre generals who decided to take matters into their own hands. One wonders how things would have ended if Stalin had been on the ground and not many miles away in snowbound Moscow. Beevor does a wonderful job relaying all the information to a generalist reader. Some have slighted him because it is written in a journalistic style. I think this is big strong point since his easy prose makes Stalingrad a much more enjoyable read. You'll need sleeping pills, for you won't forget this book in a hurry. Five Stars.
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Summary: Excellent Account of a Titanic Struggle
Review: If you are at all interested in the Battle of Stalingrad, I would highly recommend this book. Whether you are new to the battle, or you have read other accounts, I think you will enjoy this book. The one thing I really appreciated was the author's objectivity. Many accounts either have a pro-German (valiant German warriors beaten by ineffective strategy) or pro-Soviet (valiant Soviet warriors defeating the fascist monsters) bias. Beevor detailed the horror that this battle truly was, the ruthlessness and inhumanity on both sides. In the beginning, he shows how the Russian soldier was ruthlessly sacrificed by the Soviets, and Stalin, and how this changed at the end where the German soldier was ruthlessly sacrificed by the Nazis and Hitler. One of the most refreshing aspects of the book, however, was the author's treatment of the German allies, particularly the Italian's and Rumanian's. Rather than portraying them as the scapegoats for German defeat, he detailed the criminal way these soldiers were treated, from the lack of modern weaponry to the way they were stretched so thin as to make it impossible for them to offer any kind of organized resistance. The battle was not lost by these soldiers, rather by the arrogance of the German High Command in thinking they could continue to suffer horrendous losses in futile street fighting in the City of Stalingrad itself. Also invaluable is the author's portrayal of conditions in the "Kessel" after the Russian encirclement of the Sixth Army. This is an excellent addition to the history of this historic and titanic struggle.
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Summary: Beevor's Inferno
Review: Beevor's Inferno Beevor plays Virgil while you, the reader, play Dante. But this excellent, detailed account of the battle of Stalingrad makes the Inferno seem almost quaint by comparison. From Hitler's Operation Barbarossa to Stalin's Operation Uranus, this book describes the massive crap-storm that humans can kick up when they try their hardest. Or, in the case of the Nazi military bureaucracy, don't try at all. Above all, Stalingrad is the story of how millions of people find misery and death in the titanic struggle between two of history's most malevolent egomaniacs. I strongly recommend this book to anyone with the naive notion that there is a limit to the human capacity for evil. Beevor is objective in his treatment of the politics behind this struggle, and tends to treat events in a cause-and-effect manner. Of course, his well-researched presentation of the facts speaks for itself. War is Hell, and Stalingrad was Hell to the tenth power. Read it and weep.
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Summary: Good, but.....
Review: STALIGNRAD is a good book about the famous battle but, as with a lot war books written by British writers, it sometimes lacks feeling or emotion, being sometimes very dry.
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Summary: The book succeeds in spite of the writing
Review: The material here is so fascinating that any author armed with reams of historical data could do it justice. That is more or less what Beevor does in this book. His style is overly dry and technical, but nonetheless loaded with information that is hard to fathom. Anyone with an interest in WWII history or warfare in general will want to pick up this book, chronicling surely the most important battle in the history of mankind. Anyone who still subscribes to the theory that the Americans and Brits made Europe and the world save from fascism will do well to begin here. Had the Germans triumphed at Stalingrad, everyone from the Russians to the Greeks to the war-God French would be speaking German today. The author comes armed with loads of fascinating research, factoids, and statistics that chronicle the build-up throught the aftermath of the battle. Again, it's just too dry in too many parts and also dehumanizes many of the ordinary participants in the siege. The enormous historical importance of this makes the book worth reading, even though in the hands of a better and more inventive writer it could have been twice as good.
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Summary: Detailed and well written Stalingard
Review: I had heard a lot about this book before I finally bought the pocket version. And I must say, as a student of East European affairs, this book added a lot to what I had read about this amzing and terrifying battle between the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Before reading I knew that Stalin was ruthless, Beria was a a monster etc etc. But all the little detalis presented in this wonderful and indeed very exciting book (I almost was unable to put it aside, but my children forced me...) gave me a much deeper insigth into this horrible campaign. Now I really understand the suffering of both soldiers and civilians during this dark period of Europan history! Not 100% perfect, but almost!!
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Summary: Stalingrad: The Ultimate Novel
Review: Few books have been able to strike a chill in me as Antony Beevor's masterpiece has. It is the most profound reference on war, or for that matter, on any subject, I have ever having the opportunity of reading. I bought this book after reading other Stalingrad studies, but I had not been able to gather the details and overall grandure of the battle as I have here. I had not been able to gather the gigantic scope and horror that the Battle of Stalingrad was. Beevor is a brilliant historian and writer who has gone above and beyond the call of duty by literally bringing to life the war in Stalingrad through a amazing and impressive amount of details. Most of the information has never been known up until this point and it most certainly has not been recycled or recalled as new. Beevor went to Germany and Russia and splurged into archives that have never been published before. Beevor has provided and excellent service to us by writing down this fascinating information, information that I will never forget. Stalingrad's haunting and disturbing prose is also credited to Beevor. He has created the book in a no nonsense-tell it like it is style which gives the book its lasting impression on the reader. I was emotionally exhausted by the end of the mammoth sized book. All of the information is expertly analyized by Beevor and surprisingly accurate. You empathize with the people in this book and the devastating struggle that they endured. There is no bias here; this is the profound work on the subject because it delves deep into the political views, historical narration, personal accounts of soldiers and higher ranking people as well as civilians. The book really achieves the goal it set out for itself. There are a plethora of maps within the contents of the book to enhance the text as well as several well chosen photographs.Beevor took no expense in delivering the harsh reality to us. It was really well researched and is by no means the journalistic view that people surmised it was. The book is explained in graphic detail like no other book has. I was able to visualize everything that was going on during the worst battle that maybe was ever fought. There is little that I can say that would any better enhance the work of this book. It was set up brilliantly by studying the first announcement of Barbarossa and continued it's astonishing narrative through battles end. The emotion in the book is wildly unpretentous. Beevor has done it! He has single-handedly created the most in-depth, thorough, accurate, emotional and unbias account on war ever. It is my favorite book and a very important one as well. I knew tons of facts about Stalingrad before I read this book, yet I learned so much more. It truly is a profound and remarkable book and I can honestly say that Beevor is the greatest historian. He deserves all of the accolades that this book has recieved. So for it's wealth of knowledge, sources, analysis and workmanship, I highly recommend this book to you.
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