Stalingrad
A narrative history of the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43), built from then newly opened Soviet archives, German army records, soldiers' letters, and survivor interviews, following the campaign from Operation Barbarossa to the encirclement and surrender of the German Sixth Army. It won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999.
A hundred pages in you are still nowhere near the city; a reader complains that "Beevor starts with way too much context on Operation Barbarossa." When the battle arrives it settles into a loop, attack, counterattack, attack again, until "after awhile it became so repetitive and predictable" (that from a WWII lifer who needed ten months to finish). You follow it blind, since the book is "awfully short of maps" for a fight this dense. Worse, the slant: "The author tries very hard to hammer in the notion of every Red Army soldier being a drunken lout," one detractor writes, anecdote doing the work evidence should, while another balks from the opposite camp: "Germans by the end of the book are treated as defenders of Stalingrad (!) I mean what?"
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
