At near 500 pages it's deep and dense enough giving you just about the most comprehensive account of the Battle of Stalingrad, yet never becomes boring or too academic making for an immensely addictive and intense read if you like your WW2 history books. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Kent and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, London. I don't think this is entirely my fault, because there is a distinct anti-Soviet bias in Beevor's telling.

In the summer of 1942 German axis forces descended on the small city of Stalingrad, Russia, pollution 400,000. As he also reveals, since the fall of Rostov, any means of igniting resistance had become permissible: on September 8, a picture in Stalingrad Front newspaper showed "a frightened girl with her limbs bound.I'm not one to give too much information away, but what I can say is that if you want to read a book that will keep you hooked from page to page, and stir all emotions inside you, than Stalingrad should be at the top of your list! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Go to William Craig's Enemy at the Gates for that, then ease into ostensibly more detailed accounts like Beevor's. Still, it's a gripping, absorbing and important book, showing just how close Russia came to full Nazi occupation and the terrible consequences of two evil men in Hitler and Stalin coming to blows. The author tells the story of this terrible battle through the accounts of those soldiers who endured this inferno and survived as well as using letters and diaries of those who didn't!

The Russian advance toward Germany forced Germans to defend Nazism in the same way as the German aggression forced Russians to defend Stalinism - this author's conclusion explains a lot of nations' controversial decisions to support their leaders in modern times. Atlanta Journal Constitution “Before any self-proclaimed guru says one more word about “military operations in urban terrain” he or she ought to read British historian Antony Beevor’s monumental new work on the battle for Stalingrad. Others, however, kept glancing ahead to the blazing buildings on the western shore, their steel-helmeted heads instinctively withdrawn into the shoulders. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler's territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline.How do we process the overwhelming inhumanities that occurred during the years of that war, Stalingrad in particular? On his retreat, Napoleon famously remarked that "from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a single step. Beevor combines a soldier's understanding of war's realities with the narrative techniques of a novelist . After less than two weeks in the line, a company in Colonel Korfes's regiment of the 295th Infantry Division was on the its third commander, a young lieutenant. But if you can over look this thn your left with a very good book, detailing the background to the battle, the actual battle and what happened to the victors and defeated of both sides after the battle.