bloguldesefe
Perfect balance between easy to read and informative; simplified basics but still plenty of factual details, so not dumbed down as many books of this "introduction to" kind. Also, plenty of illustrations (mostly historical Japanese art, so not that informative, but beautiful).
The book is well written and well informed (constantly more/better on Stalin than Hitler, constantly going deeper and more into subtleties in the personal level interactions, while the Nazi half stays more into general) but the comparative format (1 Hitler chapter, 1 Stalin and so on) is tiring and distracting. This could have been a good book (on Hitler) and an excellent book (on Stalin), but mixed together it turns mediocre at best.
To be honest, i just couldn't understand what the hell was going on. Is this maybe not the 1st book in a series?
This could have been really really good, but for the endless, countless, large, boring and completely useless digressions (about the Chinese expeditions a century before, about the intrigues in Rome in choosing popes, about the Holy Roman empire and so on, even entire pages about Filipino sex)...
A very mixed bag of short (and some not short at all) stories, varying from really good (mostly the second half) to really bad (the first half, especially the first 3) and all the degrees in between.
Very good story, but terrible style (everything that could be said in 3 simple words is said in 3 convoluted pages)
A meandering flood of interesting little historical anecdotes, but going nowhere. There is no structure, central thesis or some overarching conclusions (as in Sapiens for ex.) and not even a clear stream of thoughts. So, good to grab the attention of high schoolers or first year students, but nothing more.
Boring, unstructured, superficial, way too skematic and way too one-sided (lacking objectivity, which is a must for a history book). Also,horribly naive towards Communism (i grew up in a stalinist dictatorship, i know what communism is).
First 60% were 10/10, character driven, with some original concepts and good story (felt 90% like reading Abercrombie, just without his more Tarantino-esque humor/over the top occurences). Also good flowing writing and good rhythm.
Unfortunately, the last 30% are quite bad, 4/10 bad and consists only of "action! Action!! ACTION!!!" and bad at that also, since the character development becomes useless or even strongly inconsistent (Nancy) and the author is not good at writing battles, neither at 1st person POV, nor in the tactical view.
Will not read the rest of the series.
Might be useful to mention i read Iggulden before: loved the Genghis series, but disappointed with Lion of Sparta (mediocre to lame) and Dunstan (straight up bad).
Gorgeous and very good as a (tabletop) album. Excellent graphic quality and thick shiny paper.
Way too superficial to work as a book about tanks, though.
In itself, it could have been a very good memoirs - the human side is honest and engaging.
Unfortunately, the book is slightly dragged down by the fact the author is not an intelligent person (naive at best, way less than smart most probably) and greatly dragged down by the strong propaganda content and approach, by the several episodes completely lacking believability (obvious and technically ridiculous lies, such as an already damaged ground attack plane shooting down 4 enemy dedicated fighters, alone, or 2 crappy I16 going against 6 much more modern Me109 and winning the fight, and more in this vein) and the typical hateful Russian schizophrenia: when a Russian shoots down Germans, great hero, amazing brave, what a guy and so on; when the enemy shoots down Russians, they are always "scum, vultures, jackals".
The enemy is also never Germans (or Romanians, Italians and so on) they are always all fully "Hitlerites, Fascists", and of course plenty of "scum", "crawling" and so on. Among those scum were my grandfather (returned, but fucked up) and grandmother's brother (KIA) and they never called the Russian enemy anything else than soldiers or humans, even in private talks, just like many other ww2 (Romanian, so Axis) veterans i read or spoke to, including ground attack pilots (so the exact same thing as Egorova, minus the blind hatred). They actually pitied those they bombed, while this author always and strongly enjoys it.
Overall, a potentially good book brought down by propaganda, ridiculous "hunter's stories" and blind hatred.
Too YA for me - this is a well-written, funny, action, good alternative to The Three Musketeers. Had I read it in my pre-teen years, I would have loved it. In my 40s, not at all...
The story still holds up very well, with excellent gothic worldbuilding and characters and well maintained mystery.
The Victorian writing style, though, slow and protracted, with half the book made up from letters and diary entries and the dialogues few, short and far apart, is not that captivating any more for the modern reader, to be honest.
Total de acord cu ideile, interpretările și perspectivele autorului. Deloc de acord cu stilul: o combinație nedigerabila de eseu, cu epistolar, cu amintiri fără context, cu "stream of consciousness".
The military part (the battles) is very good, but the rest of the plot is 4th grade (elementary school) level simplistic, basic, black&white crap... I really felt my intelligence as a reader was very strongly underestimated and offended.
As a Last Kingdom - LK (book and TV) series great fan, I was incredibly disappointed with this one - where LK is serious and dark and warrior-mindset like, this is melodrama, soap-opera/telenovella great passions and romance.
The male MC is a non-descript Mary Sue that does not seem to exist (so far from Uthred), the female MC is ridiculous and annoying and wildly-reacting to anything (plus everybody wants to rape her, that seems to be her main role in the book, rape-target), the antagonist is pumped-up nasty in a ridiculous Banderas style and so on.
The writing itself is better here than LK, but the story and characters are teenage-drama level.
The battles are very well done, but too few among the plenty passion-drama moments.
I bought the entire 4 book series at once - now they all go straight to garbage.
So, final warning: if you are a Last Kingdom fan, this is NOT for you!
Good book with some good Eastern Front combat, but the MC is too super smart, super lucky, super brave, super admired, superhero, to be 100% believable - definitely less than other ww2 German veterans memories. Also, a lot of the book in non-combat (him in Germany and Italy).
overlong and over-boring - the description applies to almost all the stories, and it definitely applies to the anthology as a whole, which I consider a failure. I am a history buff and also a scifi fan, so I expected and wanted to love this book. But I did not.Most stories are not badly written, on the contrary; unfortunately, they are utterly uninteresting.the only exception being Chalker's ”Dance Band on the Titanic”, but even that is not a 5/5 because of the lame ending.