Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant work by the best writer of WWII fiction going
Review: Robbins follows his previous two Eastern Front novels with the final in the trilogy. Here he describes the horrific battle of Kursk. Still, as in all Robbins's novels, the combat scenes, so powerfully drawn and cleanly researched, serve as the backdrop for deep and insightful character studies. The relationship between father and son, trapped inside a tiny T-34 tank while they are trapped in opposing ideologies, crackles with tension and authenticity. The daughter, dauntless, a Night Witch pilot, embarks on a dangerous rescue, and fights her own reluctance to risk both physical danger and love. The villain, Luis, fights for a plausible and powerful reason, redemption. Breit, a German intel officer, decides to become a Soviet spy after reviewing his life through the lens of Cubist art, then embarks on a great and dangerous mission, to make sure the Russians win at Kursk. These are not the themes of any other writer of WWII fiction except Robbins. The rest of the crowd plow through with battle and machines, while only Robbins, time and again, delivers from the heart. Read this book if you like historical fiction, or if you just want a rousing tale of adventure. But especially read it if you admire fabulous and well-paced writing, beautiful language and vocabulary, and most of all, if you respect a writer who uses challenging backgrounds - like the greatest land battle in history - to bring out the best and worst in his characters. In every book, Robbins stretches and grows. Pick this one up, then go get his others if you haven't already. He is poetical and powerful at the same time. He'll become one of your favorite writers, like he is one of mine.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent read! Don't miss this one!
Review: The Last Citadel is an incredibly intense and often breathtaking book! The battle scenes from the prospective of the tankers of both sides are of an intensity rarely glimpsed in any form. As a former Army tanker, I found the writer's style to be accurate and so very realistic. His use of words to describe all facets of the conflict, emotional, intellectual as well as physical, from the perspectives of the characters is excellent. This author brings alive a time that we Americans have only heard a little of, and does great justice to the bravery, dedication and suffering of those forgotten masses who participated in that greatest of all conflicts-the Russian Front of World War II. In the same class as "The Cross of Iron" by Willi Heinrich, "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer, and "War of the Rats; A Novel" by David Robbins. Don't miss this book!
Rating:
Summary: A Military Classic
Review: The Last Citadel is fast-paced military fiction with its soul in the stars. The author gets the details right, but does not obsess over the grade of lead in the bullets, or the chemical composition of the propellants. Instead, he takes the swirling Battle of Kursk, millions of men and thousands of machines, and pulls it into focus as the ancient tale of a single man facing an immortal monster. Leathery old Dimitri is armored with little more than his Kazak honor, and his T-34 seems like cardboard against Hitler's latest superweapon, the massive Tiger tank. This is classic stuff disguised as hot-running fiction. Author David L. Robbins is not out to take Tom Clancy's lunch, he's trying to catch Hemingway and Steinbeck. The Battle of Hill 260.8 will make you stand up and cheer, and the Award of the Order of Buttons is a most perfect recognition of battle honors. These two scenes combine into one of the most powerful passages ever written, in any language.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written and informative
Review: The Last Citadel is one of the few (maybe the only) novels that centers around the Battle of Kursk, the last major German offensive in Russia. Many Americans are familiar with Stalingrad, a topic of another Robbins novel but far fewer know about this ghastly, titanic battle. Robbins does an outstanding job of describing the German plans and the Soviet counter-plans, not leaving out the very important and often overlooked role that espionage and treason played in the ultimate outcome of the war. Even though I have read extensively about the Russo-German war I never knew until I read this novel that non-Aryans could serve as Waffen SS officers or that Russian families fought together in the same tank. Robbins is to be commended for educating as well as entertaining his readers.
Even though this book is informative it is first and foremost a novel, and here it succeeds brilliantly. Robbins is an excellent creator of interesting and sympathetic characters. On the Russian side there is a Cossack family, father and son fighting together in the same T-34 tank while the daughter flies night bomber mission. On the German side there is Robbins' best creation, the Spanish SS officer along with an SS colonel, an art historian turned intelligence officer with his own agenda. I grew to like all these characters so much I was afraid to read the ending for fear that I would lose one or more.
Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Could've used some realistic characters
Review: This book gives a pretty good overview of the battle of Kursk, which was pretty much the point where Germany lost the ability to end World War II in anything but defeat, but the characters are straight out of a soap opera... a Russian father-son duo in a tank, one a diehard communist, the other an old-school cossack; the aforementioned father's daughter, a bomber pilot who goes on an action-movie campaign with partisans behind German lines; a high-level Wehrmacht officer passing information to the USSR in the hopes of saving Germany from itself; and a Spanish Waffen-SS officer who, despite being one the most interesting characters, loses all semblance of subtle character development midway through and becomes a physical manifestation of Nazi evil. Excellent descriptions of tank battles, though, and it gives a very good impression of just how huge Eastern Front battles were, and how many men it took to stop the Nazis.
Rating: 
Summary: Tigers, T 34s, Partisans and Nightwitches
Review: This is a thrilling adventure book, you can feel yourself riding in the Tiger tank at the tip of Hitler's last offensive in Russia, battling hordes of soviet T34s thrown in your way. You can also experience the soviet side in the eyes of the Berko family, a Cossak clan that true to tradition goes to war as a family. Meet Dmitry and Vasily a father and son battling themselves and the germans in the inside of their T 34 tank, growing apart and then coming together in a climactic battle against a behemont tiger tank. Also Nadia, Dmitry's daughter in her improbable air battles with the nightwitch squadron and as a partisan in search of her beloved fighter pilot shot behind german lines. The german characters are interesting starting with Luis, the Spanish matador in command of a Tiger Tank in Hitler's bodyguard (very improbable but a nice literary touch) as a man seraching for redemption and Breit the SS Colonel turned soviet spy in a moral crisis. It was fun and fast reading and I have been expecting for a novel in the subject of the Greatest Battle ever fought as was Kursk. To complement your knowledge in this subject I also recommend Glantz's Battle of Kursk book for the historic background of this novel. For WW II buffs and armchair generals this is going to be a very pleasant experience.
Rating:
Summary: No clean shots and meaningful last words.
Review: This is an extremely well written work. Like the British historian-novelist David Howarth, David Robbins is able to take an enormous yet isolated incident and wrap it around three separate stories, a Spanish officer in the German Panzer Division trying to recapture his dignity after a near fatal shooting the year before, a young Russian woman trying to find her pilot lover shot down behind enemy lines, and a father and son on both sides of Russian Communism incarcerated in tight, hellish quarters in a Russian T-34 Tank during the Battle of Kursk in July of 1943. All this unfolds in the largest tank battle ever culminating with the American invasion of Sicily on July 11, 1943. You don't have to be a WWII buff to be thoroughly mesmerized by this book, but as in reading an Alan Furst novel, it helps. Professor Robbins deftly paints an accurate view of Hitler's last stand in Russia after the savage defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, rolling the dice before the Americans enter the war in Europe, thereby turning his near impossible two front war into the resulting three front war. Yet Robbins does this with beautiful writing. At one point he describes a train station where a passenger train lays in wait while tracks are replaced from a bombing 12 hours earlier: "It had no roof left, just scored beams, and it's sills were marred with brows of soot." Later Katya, about whom one of the stories revolves, awakens before her night mission as some other aircraft take off. "Once they took off [she] listened to the silence return . . . serrated only by crickets and a mechanic hammering at something stubborn." While telling his stories the description of the battle takes on a more vivid meaning as the reader has humans to appreciate as Churchill wrote, 'their blood, sweat and tears.' An excellent novel. Rarely are we so intrigued about historical events that involve no Americans, on a plain in the Ukraine we never heard of, with the names of players for the most part we can't pronounce. Kudos to David Robbins. 5 stars. Easily 6 or 7. Larry Scantlebury
Rating:
Summary: David Robbins does it again
Review: This is David Robbins third World War II novel. He started out good and just gets better. I found myself staying up later than I intended just to find out what was happening next. He does a very good job of giving you an overview of the entire battle while including a personal level with characters on both sides. His characters are realistic, too. They all have some problems while believing in their own causes. Nor can they be simplistically divided into good and bad, each being a mix of both. The result is that they are believable and interesting. If you enjoy WWII or action novels you should like this. If you read the reviewer who complains of David's writing I have to say I disagree. I have the paperback and if there are 'comma splices' they did not bother me (and I have written 3 college textbooks for a major publisher). I even went back to look for a reference to 'June 31' and did not find it. The author uses chronological headers and subheads and in my copy they progress fron June 30 to July 1 (in fact there are several July 1 subheads with different hours of that day), so if June 31 is in the book it is probably a typo rather than a mistake by the author.
Rating:
Summary: put your feet up, and get ready for a long stay
Review: This is great read, a fun way to soak up meticulously researched history and to live with some very compelling characters. Robbins knows his stuff and he delivers the story with style.
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