title: A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945
author:  Vasily Grossman 
description: A first-rate volume of war reporting that belongs with the best work of writers like Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling and John Hersey. . . . Convey[s] the taste, the smell and the sounds of the front lines.<i>The New York Times Book Review</i><br /><br />Overwhelmingly powerful. [Grossmans] combination of passion and detail, of patriotic fervor and journalistic objectivity, makes <i>A Writer at War</i> one of the greatest documents of World War II.<i>The New York Sun</i><br /><br />Gripping...[has] the immediacy of eyewitness observation, but also the novelist's sensitivity to the men and women whose lives and deaths he was recording.<i>The Boston Globe </i><br /><br />Excellent...Grossman, like Isaac Babel twenty years before him, lifts war correspondence to new heights.<i>Literary Review</i>
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  VASILY SEMYONOVICH GROSSMAN was born on December 12, 1905, in Berdichev, a
  Ukrainian town that was home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities. In
  1934 he published both “In the Town of Berdichev”—a short story that won the
  admiration of such diverse writers as Maksim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and
  Isaak Babel—and a novel, _Glyukauf_ , about the life of the Donbass miners.
  During the Second World War, Grossman worked as a reporter for the army
  newspaper _Red Star_ , covering nearly all of the most important battles from
  the defense of Moscow to the fall of Berlin. His vivid yet sober “The Hell of
  Treblinka” (late 1944), one of the first articles in any language about a Nazi
  death camp, was translated and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. His
  novel _For a Just Cause_ (originally titled _Stalingrad_ ) was published in
  1952 and then fiercely attacked. A