Stalingrad

Stalingrad: the Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 / Antony Beevor,  493 p.

Once again, Antony Beevor does not disappoint.  After devoting a good many hours to Vasily Grossman's fictional Stalingrad and Life and Fate, it was fitting to round out my reading with Beevor's fascinating work.  As in his recent The Battle of Arnhem, Beevor beautifully weaves a mountain of research with first-person accounts from both sides of the conflict to create a view of this decisive battle that is both panoramic and minutely detailed.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Grossman's journalism was an important source for Beevor.

The Beauty and the Sorrow / Peter Englund / 540 p.

I'm stretching the category a bit here, but I thinks it's fair to call this a biography. In this case, we have the biographies of 20 people who lived and experienced the Great War. They are men and women of many nationalities representing both sides of the conflict. Englund has pulled their stories from journals, letters, and other records and takes us through a chronology of the war, laying out each of their stories over time. This is a fascinating approach, although initially it makes for challenging reading. I found myself flipping back and forth repeatedly to check the photos of each 'character' as their entries came up. This unique work is well worth the effort.