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and MacGregor effectively uses primary sources, including the archived personal stories of Soviet veterans and the unpublished memoir of German officer Friedrich Roske, who comes fully alive in these pages—as does Alexander Ilyich Rodimtsev, whose 1967 memoir also furnishes significant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
BOOK REVIEW
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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