An adjunct to but no replacement for earlier, more-skilled accounts.
The voices of the combatants enliven this account of the Battle of Stalingrad.
The titular structure, for those unfamiliar with details of this pivotal conflict, is no aid to maritime navigation but instead a four-story apartment building in the middle of Stalingrad that became a critical garrison for Soviet forces struggling to repel the Nazi invaders. Given the call sign “Lighthouse,” it provided a commanding vantage point amid the rubble that surrounded it (marked “ruins” on an accompanying map) and became the stuff of legend when its dramatic storming by Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov and an ethnically diverse group of guardsmen hit the Soviet propaganda machine. Despite the title and his introduction’s insistence on the need to examine the truth behind the myth, MacGregor spans the entire campaign, from Hitler’s decision in spring 1942 to take out Stalingrad on the way to the Caucasian oil fields to the ignominious surrender of the tattered remains of the Sixth Army in winter 1943. The capture of “Pavlov’s House” occupies a chapter midway through, but the author reserves an actual examination of the myth for the epilogue. Uncertain focus notwithstanding, the battle makes for a compelling account, and MacGregor effectively uses primary sources, including the archived personal stories of Soviet veterans and the unpublished memoir of German officer Friedrich Roske, who comes fully alive in these pages—as does Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev, whose 1967 memoir also furnishes significant color. MacGregor’s telling, however, is notably rough. In addition to presenting readers with the usual alphanumeric thicket of names pervasive in military histories, the author has a propensity for convoluted, awkward sentences that make the reading experience a slog. That the drama of the conflict, with the fighting waged room by room, still comes through is no small testament to the story’s bones, but readers will find a more satisfying study in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad.
An adjunct to but no replacement for earlier, more-skilled accounts.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982163-58-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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