SOS TITLE UNKNOWN - Hardcover

Vasily Grossman

4.18

3,452 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067697810X ISBN 13: 9780676978100

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2005

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Edited and translated from the Russian by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova Knopf Canada is proud to present a masterpiece of the Second World War, never before published in English, from one of the great Russian writers of the 20th century – a vivid eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and “the ruthless truth of war.”

When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Red Army’s newspaper. A Writer at War – based on the notebooks in which Grossman gathered raw material for his articles – depicts the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. It also includes some of the earliest reportage on the Holocaust. In the three years he spent on assignment, Grossman witnessed some of the most savage fighting of the war: the appalling defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine and much more.

Historian Antony Beevor has taken Grossman’s raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions – at once unflinching and sensitive – we have ever had of what he called “the ruthless truth of war.”

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Review:

"A first-rate volume of war reporting that belongs with the best work of writers like Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling and John Hersey. . . . Convey[s] the taste, the smell and the sounds of the front lines."--The New York Times Book Review

"Overwhelmingly powerful. [Grossman's] combination of passion and detail, of patriotic fervor and journalistic objectivity, makes A Writer at War one of the greatest documents of World War II."--The New York Sun

"Gripping...[has] the immediacy of eyewitness observation, but also the novelist's sensitivity to the men and women whose lives and deaths he was recording."--The Boston Globe

"Excellent...Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights."--Literary Review

About the Author:

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) came to be regarded as a hero of the Second World War. Life and Fate, his novel about the siege of Stalingrad, was written in 1960 but was declared a threat to the Soviet government and was confiscated by the KGB. Twenty years later it was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and published to wide acclaim in the West.

Antony Beevor was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. A regular officer in the 11th Hussars, he served in Germany and England. He has published several novels, and his works of non-fiction include The Spanish Civil War, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, which won the 1993 Runciman Award, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 and Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. With his wife, Artemis Cooper, he wrote Paris: After the Liberation: 1944-1949. His book Stalingrad was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999.

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