content: Just an ordinary guy who likes to learn about the world by reading non-fiction from my public library. Takes a while to get used to the way the original notes of Grossman are interspersed within the editors explaination of the setting. Grossman truely was the Ernie Pyle of the Soviet Red Army. The editors give me the feeling that Stalin probably would have sent him to the gulags or worse after the war simply because he was "human" in his writing, if he had not been so popular as a correspondent for the official Red Army newspaper. If the USSR had broken up after Stalin died, maybe he could have compiled all his notes himself into a great read about the ordinary soldiers and all the generals, but the editor and translater did well putting his notes in order and tying them together to make sense of it for us. Now I'll have to see if any of Grossman's earlier novels are available in English.