Promotional Information

Antony Beevor's Stalingrad is a harrowing look at one of history's darkest moments.

About the Author

Antony Beevor's latest book is Ardennes 1944 - Hitler's Last Gamble. He is the author of Crete - The Battle and the Resistance, (Runciman Prize), Stalingrad, (Samuel Johnson Prize, Wolfson Prize for History and Hawthornden Prize for Literature), Berlin - The Downfall, The Battle for Spain (Premio La Vanguardia), and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, (Prix Henry Malherbe and the Royal United Services Institute Westminster Medal). His next work The Second World War was another No. 1 international bestseller. His books have appeared in more than thirty languages and have sold more than six and a half million copies. According to the Bookseller, 'Beevor is the bestselling historian of the BookScan era'. A former chairman of the Society of Authors, he has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Kent, Bath, East Anglia and York, and he is also a visiting professor at the University of Kent. In 2014, he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.

Reviews

A superb re-telling. Beevor combines a soldier's understanding of war's realities with the narrative techniques of a novelist ... This is a book that lets the reader look into the face of battle -- Orlando Figes Sunday Telegraph A brilliantly researched tour de force of military history -- Sarah Bradford The Times

A superb re-telling. Beevor combines a soldier's understanding of war's realities with the narrative techniques of a novelist ... This is a book that lets the reader look into the face of battle -- Orlando Figes Sunday Telegraph A brilliantly researched tour de force of military history -- Sarah Bradford The Times

This gripping account of Germany's notorious campaign combines sophisticated use of previously published firsthand accounts in German and Russian along with newly available Soviet archival sources and caches of letters from the front. For Beevor (Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949), the 1942 German offensive was a gamble that reflected Hitler's growing ascendancy over his military subordinates. The wide-open mobile operations that took the 6th Army into Stalingrad were nevertheless so successful that Soviet authorities insisted they could be explained only by treason. (Over 13,000 Soviet soldiers were formally executed during the battle for Stalingrad alone.) Combat in Stalingrad, however, deprived the Germans of their principal force multipliers of initiative and flexibility. The close-gripped fighting brought men to the limits of endurance, then kept them there. Beevor juxtaposes the grotesque with the mundane, demonstrating the routines that men on both sides developed to cope with an environment that brought them to the edge of madness. The end began when German army commander Friedrich von Paulus refused to prepare for the counterattack everyone knew was coming. An encircled 6th Army could neither be supplied by air nor fight its way out of the pocket unsupported. Fewer than 10,000 of Stalingrad's survivors ever saw Germany again. For the Soviet Union, the victory became a symbol not of a government, but of a people. The men and women who died in the city's rubble could have had worse epitaphs than this sympathetic treatment. Agent: Andrew Nurnberg. History Book Club main selection; BOMC alternate selection; foreign sales to the U.K., Germany and Russia. (July)