A meticulous, scholarly study of one of the great land battles of WWII, from from the founder of the US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office and editor of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Marshal Georgy Zhukov has long been considered one of the exceptional Soviet generals of WWII, the hero of the Siege of Stalingrad who brilliantly encircled the German attacking army and obliterated it. Despite this victory and Zhukov’s drive to be the first Soviet general to conquer Berlin, his career in the “Great Patriotic War” was not without its setbacks. Primary of these was Operation Mars, in November 1942. Mars was the companion to the Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad (code-named Operation Uranus) and was key to Soviet attempts to regain the offensive. Glantz’s writing of the history of the campaign, while thick with facts and figures, is unassailable. By pulling apart German and Russian reports and communications, as well as later histories, he creates the definitive account of the battle. He assesses the reasons for the failure, which include improper artillery support, poor training of such critical elements as tank crews, a Red Army that lacked winter clothing, and the necessity (due to the high personnel losses in the army) of using officers who had earlier been judged unfit for service. Though most of this prodigious book is filled with the details of strategy and counterstrategy, there are points at which the fascinating characters of Zhukov and his officers shine through and offer a compelling narrative. Top-end scholarship that is too dense for all but the most dedicated aficionados of the Soviet-German conflict. Nonetheless, an important study that should rest on the shelf next to last summer’s brilliant, and more readable, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. (photos, maps, not seen) (History Book Club Main selection)
Pub Date: April 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-7006-0944-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
A memorable report of a monthlong 1992 expedition to Peru, featuring daring, drugs, and despotism. BBC reporter Simpson (Despatches from the Barricades, 1991) loves a good story, and Peru—source of most of the world's cocaine and home of both the relentless Shining Path guerrilla movement and an army unburdened by procedural niceties—seemed like a natural place to find one. He planned, with a group of colleagues, to cover the drug problem and the political situation for the BBC and other news organizations. But before describing this trip he whets readers' appetites with engaging preliminary tales of a trip from Brazil to visit forest-dwelling Indians and his subsequent negotiations from London over the logistics of the Peruvian trip. Arrived in Lima, Simpson and his team learn that the Peruvian police have captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Simpson's interviews show the manhunt leader to be one of the government's few committed democrats, while President Alberto Fujimori, who has suspended the constitution, wriggles out of tough questions. Navigating Peru's coca-growing region, an area off-limits to foreigners, Simpson's team, aided by a brave Peruvian journalist and some rickety forms of transport, has several adventures: They take testimony about army human-rights violations, meet a former official willing to testify about army corruption, and escape some menacing local army potentates, whom they manage to film before fleeing. Amid the tension, there is macabre humor, as when a Peruvian journalist composes for Simpson a fawning letter asking to interview a local drug lord (``Our news...has 99 per cent credibility among the people of Europe''). Simpson leaves Peru after getting the country's vice president, Maximo San Roman, on camera calling Fujimori ``the front man'' for a regime linked with drug traffickers. A good yarn with an appealing protagonist that inspires sadness for the Peruvian people and much distaste for their government. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, impassioned book from a journalist who has seen the Bosnian conflict at its worst. Vulliamy has been covering the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Guardian, winning several awards for his reportage, much of which has gone into this volume. After a pungent historical summary of the troubled nationalities that make up the population of former Yugoslavia, Vulliamy plunges readers headlong into a nightmarish war in which 85% of the dead are civilians, a war stained by concentration camps and genocidal violence. He describes a conflict in which a multiethnic Bosnian state has been caught in a territorial vise between two vicious and unprincipled neofascist states, one Croatian and one Serb; both, he says, are rabidly nationalistic and want to ``re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.'' He describes formerly Muslim villages now ``gutted, charred and lifeless''; concentration camps full of men with skeletal bodies, ``alive, but decomposed, debased, degraded.'' Vulliamy harshly criticizes diplomatic cynicism, referring to the behavior of the European Community, the Russians, and the US as nothing less than a Munich-scale appeasement that has allowed the Serbs and Croats to blackmail, lie, and wheedle their way toward the dismemberment of Bosnia. He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the politicians who engendered the butchery or the diplomats who made it possible. The reporting and the writing are comprehensive and moving, and it is hard to imagine anyone coming away from this volume not feeling enraged and dismayed by events in Bosnia. If readers are seeking an objective and detached history of this conflict, this is the wrong book. However, it is one of the best books to date on the Bosnian tragedy. A powerful and important volume.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11378-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
