Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION ROB | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Berlin, January 1945 The war draws to a close, but the fight for a vanquished city--and for history--is just beginning. On the heels of the critically acclaimed War of the Rats , the new master of historical suspense, David L. Robbins, turns his compelling vision on the waning months of World War II, when world leaders engage in a dicey game of cat and mouse to ultimately determine the fate of the second half of the twentieth century. The End of War In the final months of the war in Europe, the last act of a five-year conflagration is about to be played out. Allied generals move their war-hardened armies around the mortally wounded Nazi military machine. But strategies are being formed on a greater scale than even generals can imagine. While Churchill fumes helplessly, Roosevelt makes crucial decisions that will cede Berlin to Stalin and the Russians. The stakes are no less critical for ordinary men and women, fighting to live another day. On the ground are young Russian soldiers driven by vengeance into the teeth of the still-deadly Nazi army; American forces push forward under the political motives of a canny commander- in- chief; and the British, aloof, at odds with their Yankee counterparts, see in these last fateful moves a devastating betrayal by Washington and Moscow. The End of War vividly animates the giants who shaped history and breathes life into the heartbreaking struggles of those who merely lived it. From the chaos of the trenches on the eastern front, to the desperation of a single Jewish man hidden in a Berlin basement by a terrified mother and daughter, to the burning ambition of an American photojournalist determined to capture on film the defining moment of the war, Robbins ushers us into the sweep of history and the drama of the human face of war. An epic novel exploding with the urgency of battle and history in the making, here is The End of War.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sweeping in scope, this gripping, admirably researched historical novel resumes the account of WWII Robbins left off in War of the Rats. Picking up the narrative just before the stroke of midnight of New Year's Eve 1944, the saga moves skillfully back and forth between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill's cat-and-mouse games for postwar world control and the day-to-day hardships and terrors of ordinary figures caught up in the mortal conflict. Charley Bandy, a Tennessee tobacco farmer turned Life photographer, voluntarily returns to combat to be present for the German surrender. A pair of battle-hardened Russian soldiers, Misha Bakov and Ilya Shokhin, slog through the mud of Poland, pushing to take Berlin. And 26-year-old cellist Lottie (Charlota)Äno last name givenÄthe only female member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, lives in daily terror. Her mother is hiding a Jewish man in the cellar, and the Allied bombers are relentlessly pounding Berlin to rubble in an all-out effort to bring Hitler's Nazis to unconditional surrender. Eisenhower makes a cameo appearance, as do advisers to the Olympian triumvirate, architects of the history of the last half of the 20th century. Overwritten in places, the narrative frequently bogs down in trivia, and Robbins possesses a distracting proclivity for the random obscure (often ill-chosen) word. However, despite use of the third-person present tense, which essentially imposes the author as narrator/reporter and distances the reader from the full intensity of human experience, war buffs should find this an entertaining perspective on the end days of WWII. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
As in War of the Rats (1999), a blood-'n'-gutser set in Stalingrad, military detail abounds in Robbins' new offering, which will please those who like war novels for their hardware. Those desiring literary quality in historical fiction, however, are apt to be disappointed by Robbins' characters. None develop significantly, and none has much chance to develop as they act predictably in the situations Robbins creates. This is particularly true of the Big Three--FDR, Churchill, and Stalin--as they fence over strategy in early 1945. Much of their dialogue quotes the documentary record verbatim, with Robbins adding their supposed thoughts about one another. A second set of characters is slightly rounder. They include Life magazine photographer Charlie Bandy; Lottie, a cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; and Ilya and Misha, buddies on the front line of the Red Army. They never all meet, and the only suspense their exploits generate is that of wondering whether there will be any bullets or bombs inscribed with their names. As ex-officers demoted to a penal battalion, Ilya and Misha have the hardest time avoiding death when they lead assaults against German positions athwart the route to Berlin. Lottie's problems are the typical end-of-war Berliner's as she waits out air raids in shelters, steers clear of the Gestapo, and fears the rapine that comes with the Red Army. Meanwhile, Bandy schemes to hitch rides with American units getting close to the combat. Pulpy but probably popular WWII fare. --Gilbert Taylor
Kirkus Review
A deeply felt antiwar suspenser about the savagery preceding the fall of Hitler's Berlin. We see the giants--Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin--jockeying for political advantage as WWII enters its final months. Crafty, experienced power players, super-patriots, and super-egotists, all are devoted to their own nation's well-being but also have a lively interest in how history will measure each of them. We follow the three, viewpoints shifting, as they charm and are charmed by, bluff and are bluffed by their opponent/allies in a contest that could hardly be more consequential. The Germans have been crushed; not even Hitler doubts the totality of his defeat. The only unresolved question is which of the victorious armies is going to be first in Berlin, and the maneuvering over this is both intricate and intense. Robbins renders his real people superbly, making them vivid, even fresh--a notable accomplishment, given how often these portraits have been drawn. But the heart of the story is his imagined cast: a Russian solder in disgrace, a German cellist hiding from horror behind her music, and an American photojournalist, sent by Life magazine to wherever the fighting is most vicious (think Robert Capa). In particular, Robbins's embattled Berliners are, in their diversity, convincing and unforgettable. Each experiences the war differently, of course, and yet the damage inflicted is, at the core, grievously similar. In the German capital, waiting to be taken, the people--panicky, starving, guilt-ridden--face stark choices in dealing with one another: "Be a hero or a monster" is the way one of them puts it. Robbins views it all unsparingly. Quoting Plato, he writes: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Brilliant storytelling by an author who continues to grow and impress (War of the Rats, 1999, etc.), and who, here, seems in absolute control of his material. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Having covered the Battle of Stalingrad in The War of the Rats, Robbins's second World War II thriller details the final months of the battle for the occupation of Berlin (January-April 1945), with Churchill pleading with Roosevelt to push on to Berlin before the Russians take it and Roosevelt trying to woo Stalin at all costs into joining the fledgling United Nations. ("The war is won. The sole question is who will claim the kill.") Scenes of battle alternate with meetings among the great personalities who shape the campaign's eventual outcomeARoosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eisenhower, Montgomery. At the end, after Berlin has fallen to the Russians, a Russian officer stands amidst the rubble and exclaims, "War doesn't end.It just becomes this." A first-rate tale of war, thoughtful, gritty, and compulsively readable, this work is enthusiastically recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/00.]ADavid Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
December 31, 1944, 11:50 p.m. Bandy farm Big Laurel, Tennessee Above his head, in the cold, dark, wind-creaked rafters of the tobacco barn, Charley Bandy sees withered souls. Clustered five stalks to a stick, stepped several rows deep, they are hung upside down as though in punishment. The ten thousand leaves fill this lower reach of heaven. The air reeks of tar, thick, like the times Bandy has smelled blood. Brown and drying, crowded and alike, these are not the souls of soldiers, Bandy thinks. No. The spirits of the battle-torn shine and are upright in a much higher neighborhood. There's room among war heroes where they are; what they earned for eternity with their courage and their deaths is space, distinction. Bandy is having a melancholy moment, he knows; he's being drawn back. He shakes his noggin to rattle the pull away. But the tobacco leaves drip their sticky scent and the odor is so much like gun smoke and gauze and the morning mists of Europe. He lowers his gaze to the dirt floor of the barn. Several empty tobacco baskets lie about, waiting for another moist day to put the tobacco in case, that condition where the humidity is high to make the leaves supple enough to be handled. But this has been a dry winter, and the burley tobacco leaves, though sufficiently air-cured now dangling on their sticks overhead, can't be touched without breaking like ancient parchment. This Christmas came and went with little gift money. The family is edgy, waiting for the weather to cooperate and put the tobacco in case long enough to bundle it into hands, arrange the hands into the big woven baskets, then truck it all to the auction hall down in Marshall. The family needs to make some money, get school clothes, fix some machinery, buy next season's seed. Only a third of the leaves have been stripped and separated. The lowest leaves, called "lugs," and the paltry tips at the top all get tossed on a pile outside the barn to be used as ground cover and fertilizer. The broad middle leaves, the "smokers," get sold for bulk tobacco. The best leaves make it as far as cigar wrappers. A good, heavy harvest of smokers pays some bills. Inside the house, Bandy's mom and dad, wife, sister and brother-in-law, dozen or so uncles and aunts and cousins and their kin wait for 1945 to arrive in another ten minutes. Every one of them lives nearby, a dog wouldn't get tired jogging between all their houses, either in Big Laurel, Little Laurel, Shelton Laurel, or on a rural road associated with no town. They are tobacco farmers up here in the Appalachian hollers. The clefts between the high slopes are narrow, and arable land comes only in slim patches, always beside the roads. Nothing makes a buck better on so little land as tobacco. The Bandys, the Ketchums, the Wallins are woven together by marriages and births like the tobacco baskets, broad and firm and white, hundred-year-old clans of soil and nicotine, pocket knives, and Saturday nights at the Masonic dance hall. The clamor of his family's revelry--generational, those kids still awake squeal, the adults clink glasses and toast what they're going to do next year, the old folks cackle, the oldest ones cough--skim like sounds over a lake, tinkling and clear to Charles Bandy through the crisp, frostless mountain night. The mountain doesn't know it's New Year's Eve. The war doesn't know it's New Year's Eve. Bandy opens his palms to the kerosene lantern he brought to the barn. He washes his hands in the little heat above the vent and thinks of the GIs freezing right now in foxholes and slit trenches in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Germany. Pall Malls and Lucky Strikes are dangling from beard-shrouded soldiers' lips right now. Surely some Tennessee tobacco is glowing over there. The barn door slides open. Leaves in the rafters rustle their wrinkles; the barn takes on the feel of a cave coated in restless bats. This eerie sense disappears in just a moment, because it is her and no room she enters is a cave. She shuts the door. She has another lantern with her. "Charley." "Hey." "What're you doing out here? Everyone's inside. It's almost time." Bandy hears the piney woods in his wife's voice. Her accent is sugary, with rounded corners, not the serrated Appalachian tongue, not the mountain laurel. She comes from the flatlands, from Hendersonville, North Carolina. Her people farm tobacco down there too. Flue cured, where they keep a fire stoked in the barns day and night. They've got big plots of land, not the sloped slivers Bandy's tribe makes pay. The two met at Vanderbilt when he was a senior and she was a freshman. He graduated in journalism, then she got her teaching degree. They married and stayed in Memphis four more years. She taught third grade, he took photos for any rag that would buy them. Then eleven years ago he carried her up here to the mountains and everyone, kids, parents, family, farmers, fell over themselves for her. She could be mayor if there was a mayor; they have a postmaster and a sheriff, that's the extent of the government in these hills. "You all right?" she asks. "I'm fine, Vic." "Well, come inside. Everyone's missing you. Your mama asked me to come get you." "I'll be along directly." "Charley, I'm not going to celebrate the New Year with you out here in the barn. I have spent enough time without you already." He thinks Victoria is referring to their war-time, years gouged out of the last decade, years of fear for her, and that she wants to make him sorry for it right now, again. But she steps up close and says something different, sweetly. "You have been working way too hard since you got back. Your daddy's roof. Alvin's fence. Jane and Edgar's tractor. What about our house?" She sets the lantern on the dirt floor. She slips her arms around his waist. "What about me?" Bandy takes in her brown hair nestled under his nose. She's only five feet five, he's a good six-footer. She's got that teacher scent, squeaky clean, a role model for the kids, for sixteen years of marriage now. She's still cute, the cheerleader she used to be in college keeps dancing and doing splits in her eyes and smiles. Except for the difference in height, they look very much alike. Both have mousy hair, both are lean-faced with brown eyes. Perhaps that's why they took to each other with such speed when they met sixteen years ago, they recognized they were cut from the same tobacco-stained cloth. Bandy breathes her in. For a moment he can't smell the leaves in their firmament, or the war in its new year. Excerpted from The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin by David L. Robbins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
