a good candidate for the thriller of the summer award... gives a compelling and graphic sense of the heroism-filled nightmare called Stalingrad...A readable, gritty adventure story." --The New York Times David L. Robbins was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 10, 1954. He grew up in Sandston, a small town east of Richmond out by the airport; his father was among the first to sit behind the new radar scope in the air traffic control tower. Both his parents, Sam and Carol, were veterans of WWII. Sam saw action in the Pacific, especially at Pearl Harbor.

The story focuses in on the lives of two expert snipers, a Russian and a German, each with the goal of killing the other. The two snipers, Army Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaytsev of the Red Army and SS Colonel Heinz Thorvald of the German army, are equally matched. However, the story is complicated when a female sniper, Tania Chernova, becomes one of Vasily's most talented assistants and his battlefield lover. A frighteningly realistic patchwork depicting the long siege that changed the course of the war. Based on a true story, the novel deftly captures an extraordinary time and place in history...[in a] vivid, authentic representation of men of unusual skill and focus in the midst of a barbarous war." --Richmond-Times Dispatch There are other memorable characters like Nikki, the young German soldier, a dairy farmer from Westphalia ; Tania Chernova, a partisan fighter from Belarus and Danilov, a Russian commisar. I've been trying to branch out in my reading lately, and every time I do, I get reminded why I don't.

For six months in 1942, Stalingrad is the center of a titanic struggle between the Russian and German armies—the bloodiest campaign in mankind’s long history of warfare. The outcome is pivotal. If Hitler’s forces are not stopped, Russia will fall. And with it, the world…. I loved this book. That's quite something, coming from a person of notoriously squishy sensibilities whose last encounter with what you might call a war novel was a required reading of The Killer Angels in tenth grade.

German soldiers call the battle Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats. The combat is horrific, as soldiers die in the smoking cellars and trenches of a ruined city. Through this twisted carnage stalk two men—one Russian, one German—each the top sniper in his respective army. These two marksmen are equally matched in both skill and tenacity. Each man has his own mission: to find his counterpart—and kill him. I loved the descriptions of the bombed-out Stalingrad, jagged and honeycombed and swarming with soldiers. The details of how the two armies worked - like the commissars who kept the Russian army toeing the Communist Party line, using newsletters, loudspeakers, and guns - also intrigued me. Zaitsev was a senior sergeant of the 2nd Battalion, 1047th Rifle Regiment, 284th Tomsk Rifle Division. He was interviewed by Vasili Grossman during the battle, and the account of that interview, lightly fictionalized in his novel, Life and Fate (Part One, Chapter 55), is substantially the same as that portrayed in the novel, without putting a name to the German sniper that he dueled with. On the other hand, the duel is portrayed quite differently in Zaitsev's own book, Notes of a Sniper, [1] and in William Craig's 1974 history Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. I read this when it first came out in 2000. It was an excellent read then and has lost nothing. Many of us have read the historical accounts of the massive Soviet counter-offensive on November 19,1942 and the encirclement of the 6th Army. If you ever seen the movie, Enemy at the Gates, this book's premise is going to sound familiar to you. Of course, there is a logical explanation for that, as it is based on a true story...or it could have just been Soviet propaganda, but it's based on something.a good candidate for the thriller of the summer award... gives a compelling and graphic sense of the heroism-filled nightmare called Stalingrad...A readable, gritty adventure story." "-- The New York Times" This book, like the movie Stalingrad traverses every human emotion imaginable. The fortitude of the Russians to fight for the Rodina, not for political ideology but for themselves and the thousands of Russians caught in the grips of the Nazi war machine. He also paints a vivid description of the invaders. The arrogance has been left far behind. Stalingrad is a war unto itself. The once proud Wehrmacht is faced in a titanic struggle for what? Will the battle bring them victory or will is be just another conquered city along with thousands of others? Will the war end or will it continue to drag on taking with it tens of thousands other lives? Of course, The Nazis are the villians, but the novel presents everyone in shades of grey. The trials of the remnants of the German army as they get shot like rats in a barrel is especially heart wrenching.