politalX Politics Store - Berlin: The Downfall 1945
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List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £6.99
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780141032399
ISBN: 0141032391
Label: Penguin
Manufacturer: Penguin
Number Of Pages: 528
Publication Date: 2007-10-04
Publisher: Penguin
Studio: Penguin
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Editorial Reviews:
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Military history, even at its best, can be a cold art. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that wars involve individuals, each with their own hopes, fears and desires. Berlin: the Downfall, 1945, is Antony Beevor's account of the bloody Götterdämmerung that brought the Second World War in Europe to an end, and in which he has fused the large and the small scale effects of war. Beevor paints the broad picture of Marshals Zhukov and Konev, competing for glory and Stalin's attention, as they race their armies towards Berlin. He gives the reader a gripping account of the brutal street-by-street fighting in the German capital and provides an unforgettable portrait of the last, insane days of Hitler and his entourage in the bunker. His attention to emotional detail is what made his previous book Stalingrad such a magnificent work, combining a sweeping hisorical narrative with a remarkable sensitivity to human drama. Yet he also highlights the small details of ordinary people caught in the nightmare of history--the sick children evacuated at the last minute from a Potsdam hospital; the Soviet soldiers shaving themselves for the first time in weeks so that they would make appropriately presentable conquerors; and the Nazi Youth teenagers peddling their bikes in despairing, last-ditch attacks against the Red Army's tanks. The story Beevor tells is an almost unremittingly terrible one--one of death, rape, hunger and human misery--but he tells it with both an epic sweep and an alertness to individuality. The result is a masterpiece of narrative history that is as powerful as Stalingrad. --Nick Rennison
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Must read
Comment: Just like the Stalingrad volume, a powerful and disturbing insight into a horrific conflict that today can only barely be imagined. Brilliantly written and a compelling read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Berlin the Downfall
Comment: While I had not read Beevor's prequel to this book, Stalingrad, I nonetheless found his account of the final days of Berlin engaging. Beevor skillfully tells the tale of the rivalries between the Russian generals as they vie for the prize of conquering the Third Reich first and bit by bit chronicles the advances of Russian soldiers towards the German capital. This is a very detailed account of the Russian side of the war and as such readers will need to persevere. Ultimately though a very rewarding read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Insightful.
Comment: An amazingly detailed account of the scope & horror of the event. For all the movies & documentaries about WWII they berely scratch the surface of the reality of warfare. If war's were told like this we may be more apprehensive about starting new ones. Seven million strong the Red Army had on the border of East Prussia prior to the invasion, that was the entire population of Australia at the time!
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Berlin" or "The Last Battle"?
Comment: This book is, in fact, made up of three shorter books welded together and none of them quite work.
The first is a book about the strategy of the end of the war in Europe, focusing on the advance of the Soviet armies. This is just plain confusing, with inadequate maps and indistinct Soviet generals commanding armies that are literally just numbers and attacking places you've never heard of. My advice is: you know what's going to happen so skip through them.
The second book is a description of the final days of Hitler and his entourage in the Bunker. Even to a casual history reader like me, this was very, very familiar ground. Watching the film "Downfall", while maybe not as historically accurate, is far more memorable and evocative.
Squashed in between these two is the third book, the really interesting one, about what ordinary people - be they German civilians, Russian soldiers, or prisoners-of-war - experienced, thought and felt. These were far-and-away the most interesting sections, although (as other reviewers have noted) it seems a bit obsessed with rape almost any woman by Soviet troops. I am not saying this doesn't deserve attention: it must have traumatised the victims beyond my imagining and ruined many lives, but the author returns to it over and over again and the repetition becomes slightly numbing. More emphasis could have been given to how people lived for the rest of the time.
The other serious quibble I have is that the book takes way too long to get going. Despite being called "Berlin", it begins in January in Poland and it is almost halfway over before the fighting gets to Berlin. The book is easy enough reading and did keep me going but really only to find the next genuinely interesting patch. There were certainly some of these - for example, the author can barely conceal his impatience, even contempt, for what he sees as the naivety of Eisenhower, Marshall and Roosevelt in their dealings with the Soviet army and Stalin in particular.
So, good in parts, but way too long. There's far too much repetition of familiar material here - if only this was genuinely a book about the people involved in the battle in Berlin. Since finishing "Berlin" I have read "The Last Battle" by Cornelius Ryan - I would recommend the latter.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The audio cd
Comment: I read this captivating yet deeply tradgic account of the catastrophic end to the German third reich, but was even more taken by the audio version. If you can afford the unabridged version, or can borrow it from your library you will be totally absorbed by the wonderful reading of Sean Barrett. After so many hours of listening he became the commanding voice of the text and was a perfect choice and is deserving of an award for its epic power of narration.
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