Volume 46, Number 17 · November 4, 1999
Always Time to Kill
By Jason Epstein
BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ARTICLE
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943
by Antony Beevor
Penguin, 494 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
by Christopher R. Browning
HarperPerennial, 271 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Zhukov's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942
by David M. Glantz, with German translations by Mary E. Glantz
University Press of Kansas, 421 pp., $39.95
An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare
by Joanna Bourke
Basic Books, 509 pp., $30.00
The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
by Bao Ninh
Riverhead, 233 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris
by Ian Kershaw
Norton, 845 pp., $35.00
Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
by Omer Bartov
Oxford University Press, 256 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Iliad
by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles
Penguin, 702 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The First World War
by John Keegan
Knopf, 475 pp., $35.00
The Pity of War
by Niall Ferguson
Basic Books, 563 pp., $30.00
The most arresting detail in Antony Beevor's anecdotal history of the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad is a propaganda photograph taken in 1942 of a dozen or so German soldiers marching three abreast, heading east, squinting into the July sun. On this fine morning the young warriors are on their way to Stalingrad, where they will destroy its factories and homes and murder its inhabitants, people who have done them no harm and whose names they don't know and never will. If it worries them that many more than a million German troops have become casualties since Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union thirteen months previously or if they care or even know that in October their comrades murdered 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev and are at this very moment murdering millions more in Poland, their boyish faces don't show it.
Review, 7232 words
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