STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Best of 2019: Books
LEST WE FORGET: Stalingrad after the battle
[Sergey Strunnikov]
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
WHAT must be one of the outstanding events in the book publishing year was the first English edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Victor Grossman’s Stalingrad, a kind of prequel to his magnificent Life and Fate.
Grossman was throughout the second world war a special correspondent for Red Army newspaper The Red Star and was posted in 1942 to the armageddon of Stalingrad, the battle that marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s war.
More than simply a novel or history, this symphonic work captures the day-to-day desperate struggle for survival by soldiers and civilians alike.
There is no glamorisation in Grossman’s merging of cinematographic detail with a poetic prose that captures the pain, hope, love and seemingly impossible resilience of humanity at the extreme.
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