(Cornelius Ryan)I feel like I'm missing the boat on this book; It's apparently quite well reviewed (not a single 3, 2, or 1 star review on Amazon!) but I only made it halfway through. Frankly, I found the use of personal stories boring -I'll take it on faith that it isn't very much fun living in bomb-shattered Berlin, I don't need to read 15 pages of a milkman making his rounds. I also found the scene-setting (dealing with the preperations SHAEF and the Soviets were making with the final drive on Berlin) to be overlong, not that interesting, and frankly needless - like the personal stories, I felt like this could have been summed up much more succiently. The part that I found myself really interested in was the actual final offensives, and here the book is well-written and backed up with enough good primary sources to be quite gripping - but unfortuneatly this is about a third of the book, and a book being a third great and two thirds skippable isn't something I can recommend.
History nerd grade: C-
Non-nerd grade: C+
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