I'm going to try and keep this bit short this week as bad scheduling means I don't have a whole lot of time to write the review and get it up on Sunday night, so this bit suffers. Not too much for me to jabber on about here this week, anyway, which I'm sure you're all really glad about! There may be a redesign of the site in the next few weeks, which will hopefully make it easier to find your way around, not that it's too hard to get lost now. Also, the main updates to the site will be on Sundays, so you should be able to find a new recommendation from around 9pm UK time (4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific), but whatever happens, it'll definitely be up here from Monday morning.

Couple of links for you that may be of interest. After recommending The Blind Watchmaker last week, it seems that I may have been recommending it at the right time. This article in The Observer tells how Creationism is actually gaining more ground in America's schools while many fail to even mention Darwin and evolution. But, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, while some parts of the world are shouting 'Revolution! Revolution!' the deep South is still chanting 'evolution! evolution! we want our thumbs!' Have you ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really unevolved?

Probably the main news in books this week is that Michael Moore's Stupid White Men has been published, despite HarperCollins threats to pulp it for being unpatriotic in exercising Moore's right to free speech. Yes, I know a lot of Bartcop readers have (pretty justified) gripes against Moore, and I don't want to start that whole row off again, but it's good to see someone making Rupert Murdoch eat it. Still, after this, and their attempt to kill off Chris Patten's book about his time as the last Governor of Hong Kong (Rupert doesn't want to offend the Chinese, who have the power to stop him transmitting TV there) it seems that any writer who'd like to publish what they wrote, rather than the Murdochised version should be going somewhere other than HarperCollins.

Remember, if you've got any comments, or want to recommend or review a book then please email me. If I get the time this week I'll be doing a review (not a recommendation) mainly because I was so disappointed in a book I read last week, I feel the need to vent. It's my page and I can vent if I want to!

OK, here's this week's recommendation, probably of especial interest if you've been keeping up with Bartcop.com's Project 60.

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

For those of us in Britain, America and the rest of the West, the Eastern Front is one of the most overlooked areas of the Second World War. We're aware that there was an Eastern Front, that Hitler attempted to invade the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa, and after an initial advance they were pushed back with the Soviets then chasing them all the way back to Berlin, but it has never grabbed the Western imagination in the same way as the events on the Western Front and through the Pacific. Part of it's understandable, although allied with the Russians 'we' weren't fighting side by side with them there, and the stories that came back to us after the war were from our side of the battle. Also, once the Soviets became the enemy, the supposed 'Evil Empire', there was no real impetus to look at their achievements, and also no way for Western historians to get behind the Iron Curtain and discover just what happened.

Over recent years, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the opening up of archives and records to the world, the full story of Barbarossa and the epic battles across European Russia have become known to the rest of the world, bringing what had become almost an afterthought of the war into its rightful place, showing just how crucial Soviet victory in the East was to the eventual Allied victory, and just what the cost of the war was to the people who fought it there.

British historian Antony Beevor's Stalingrad is centred around the battle for and siege of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) that became the key to the war in the East, where the River Volga became the barrier that the Wehrmacht could not cross, keeping them out of the rest of Russia and buying the time needed for a counter-offensive that wouldn't end until it had overrun Berlin itself.

There have already been millions of words written about the significance of Stalingrad and in the future there will no doubt be millions more, so what makes this book so special? It comes down to Beevor's real talent as a writer, historian and storyteller. With all those words preceding him, it wouldn't be hard to write another dry historical account of the German advance, the Soviet defence, the drawn-out siege and the final counter-attack from an impartial viewpoint high in the sky. Instead of taking this approach, Beevor chooses to take the reader into the events that happened, to let you know just what it felt like to be on the ground when the Wehrmacht poured over the border into Russia or when an army of Russian T-34 tanks threw themselves against the German lines. The two sides in the war are not just impersonal forces battling each other in a vacuum, but real people making life-and-death decisions that would ripple out to affect the whole world.

Short of going through it, there's no real way to understand just what the soldiers on the Eastern Front went through, but Beevor does his best to explain and describe the situation they found themselves in, from the lives the remaining residents of Stalingrad lived through the battles and the continual street fighting to the desperation and starvation faced by the German troops caught in the Kessel at the end, surrounded by the Red Army and reduced to living on little more than a slice of bread a day in the extreme cold of the Russian winter. For an accurate vision of war as hell, this was surely amongst the closest times it has come to it.

Beevor also places Stalingrad in it's full context on the Eastern Front, showing how Barbarossa unfolded, with the Red Army pushed further and firther back as Stalin and Zhukov traded space for time to build a counter-attack and how Stalingrad became such a crucial prize for both sides, becoming an obsession for both Stalin and Hitler far beyond just the symbolic power of it being named after Stalin himself. To capture the feeling of the whole Eastern Front would take a book many times this size, but by showing us one section in detail and demonstrating how minor fluctuations could multiply out to become dramatic shifts in morale and momentum, Stalingrad gives a sense of just what happened out there.

Unless you're already heavily well-read about the Eastern Front, you'll learn something from reading Stalingrad. Beevor can explain even the most complex parts of the war simply, but never makes the reader feel patronised by his explanations. As he says in the Preface to the book, quoting the poet Tyuchev 'Russia cannot be understood with the mind' and the novel accepts this, looking to capture the reader's emotions and senses to explain what went on and shine a light on a pivotal moment of history.

OK, that's it for the this week. If you've not been keeping up with it already, I recommend Bartcop.com's Project 60, following the Second World War day-by-day sixty years later.

I'll be back with another recommendation next week. Still trying to decide which book it's going to be, but I'm sure I'll have made the decision soon enough!