A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 Paperback – 13 March 2007

I've gone through the ebook version & then decided to buy the hardcopy. Purchased the book thrice & returned it thrice. So I'm back to the ebook version. Binding split from spine in every copy. The entire batch is damaged. Purchasers are advised to exercise caution & check every book thoroughly on receipt. You have a limited return period. Dover publications, Penguin UK & Harper Collins UK imported titles are all damaged from the spine. I've returned several copies to Amazon.

Great Book about Great War

This book covers Grossman's work as a 2nd World War correspondent for the Soviet army in its titanic battle with the Germans in the eastern part of Europe. Stalingrad and Kursk covered in detail, but the book also contains pieces about the Russian soldiers, leaders, and citizens in what they called the Patriotic War. His two novels about Stalingrad rank with Tolstoy's War and Peace according to the experts. Both books are as thick as phone books but really worth a look. I have just started His novel Stalingrad and am already a fan. Be sure to read anything Grossman wrote. The Soviet government banned his work for years but copies got out to the west and were quickly and ably translated.

Vasily Grossman was Russia's preeminent war correspondent in World War II. He wrote for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) and Znamya (Banner). The troops loved him because he wrote about their lives and wasn't afraid to interview them at the front lines. He barely escaped during the early German advances on Kiev and Orel, later was at Stalingrad and at the great tank battle of Kursk, and in the end at the fall of Berlin. This book is a collection of his articles and and his unpublished notes saved by his daughter. The editor has added some footnotes and historical background. Grossman is masterful in his descriptions -- sometimes something as simple as a cat sitting on the windowsill of a ruined house. The book includes his Nov. 1944 article on the Treblinka death camp published in Znamya -- the first detailed description of the Holocaust anywhere, and initially dismissed by the western Allies as Stalinist propaganda. He never joined the Party despite others' urging and as a Jew his position could have been precarious, but his writing was so good even Stalin and the censors mostly left him alone. (He got in trouble later over his novel "Life and Fate" but that was later, and does not figure here.) This is war journalism at its best.

Excellent état, les extraits des carnets de guerre de V Grossman constituent un document historique extraordinaire. Les commentaires (Beevor et Luba Vinogradova) permettent une lecture facile même pour un lecteur peu informé sur l'URSS des années de "la Grande Guerre Patriotique". Un grand documment.

This is such a superb collection of wartime observations, interviews and analyses of the sweeping panorama of war. Grossman was the voice of the Eastern Front. A 'heroic' writer for the Soviet War machine and a man of sensitivity, humanity and compassion. He takes us through the unrelenting horror of Stalingrad with an eye for small details, a view of the ordinary man always foremost in his mind, and with a moving patriotic love and compassion for his suffering comrades. The Russian wears white in war. Is expiated for his past sins with suffering. The Russian knows how to die in war, where he struggles to live in peacetime. We are taken through other battles- Kursk with a detailed eye for military movements in their contemporary and historical contexts. Grossman understands profoundly the historical importance of the experience he is going through. We reach Berdichev and the horror of genocide against the Jews which is worsted by his experience of Treblinka. Here is writing which is extraordinarily poignant for its simplicity, its candid observation and the internal anger that is so well disciplined and marshaled by his analytical writers mind that swells like a rising tide.The book is a window into a world of so much horror and suffering, that is at times poetic, profoundly insightful and unrelentingly honest. Poignant moments are so many. The taking of Berlin is a tragic end where his compassion and humanity maintains its dignified head. Grossman feels and conveys human suffering so simply and yet so movingly and powerfully internalising so much pain, that his writing is an elegy to the gracefulness of suffering.Beevor provides much vital explanatory material between references, since much of the observations can range from one line observations, to character portraits to interviews, that the reader can get lost in the material occasionally, and i think in the first 100 pages in particular. However this book really takes off from Stalingrad and becomes a masterpiece of journalism that educates and harrows as it does hold the reader tight to it, till the end. A brilliant and crucial piece of work to understanding the monumental horrors of war in the Eastern front, and to understand the warped monstrosities of the holocaust which murdered culture, history and thousands of years of professional skills and artisanship.

Dit boek is een must voor iedereen die meer wil weten over de gevechten aan het oostfront gedurende WW 2.Het boek is bij mij ruimschoots op tijd in perfecte conditie afgeleverd. Kortom: laat niets te wensen over.