Bye Bye Beevor

It has been a strange transition, moving from holiday back to work and also operating in a Post-Foote universe. My immediate thought on Friday was to begin Beevor's Stalingrad though I first reread the Foote sections in Horwitz's Confederate in the Attic. I began the Beevor which was actually noivel in that it explored the Soviet anxiety within the diplomatic spehere about the emerging reality of Barbarosa. I read more on Saturday but gave up around p. 100. The autumn of 1942 isn't broached until p. 75 or so and I was left with this impression that the Wehrmacht was almost a hapless athletic endeavor, not unlike the Bad News bears - but with mass reprisdals and ditches teeming with corpses. Sorry for being glib, but Beevor's appeared cushioned and I thought that Craig's book Enemey at the Gates, was superior despite its own tendencies towards the anecdotal.