The reflections are useful; the conclusion is elegant. You'll want to read it either with Glantz's other books nearby, or at a computer that would enable you to check maps.

It's beautifully researched and very persuasive. ( )

A good narrative of Operation Barbarossa by the foremost expert on the Russian Front in World War II in English. Perhaps a bit too detailed in terms of names of units and commanders (as many characters as a Russian novel!) to make the narrative easy to follow. However, I appreciate his analysis of the perennial question "Could the Germans have captured Moscow in 1941 if they had gone straight for it?" Glantz opines that they probably could not have, pointing out that a major reason that the historical Operation Typhoon advanced so rapidly toward Moscow when it was first launched was that the Soviet Army had exhausted itself in that sector of the front by making two months' worth of continual attacks against the Germans (mandated by Stalin) that cost them huge casualties. According to Glantz, if the Germans had gone straight for Moscow, those Soviet forces would not have been exhausted from those incessant attacks and would have slowed the Germans down considerably. He also considers the question "If the Germans had captured Moscow, would the Soviets have stopped resisting the Germans?" He answers that by saying there is no evidence that the capture of Moscow would have caused Soviet resistance to collapse. ( )

It's not a bad book. It describes in some detail who fought who where and (to some extent) why. But the maps are woeful! It's impossible to study the actions unless you have a good quality atlas at your elbow. Better maps would have earned it another star in my rating.

Update: After I wrote this review, I realised that the maps in Alan Clark's "Barbarossa" are much better, even if the detail in his book is trumped by the release of Russian archival material over the past forty years. So, the answer is to read the Glantz book with "Barbarossa" open beside it. ( )

This is a very dry account of the first six months of Russia's war following the Nazi invasion of June 1941. The author, an academic historian with a military background, is very preoccupied with military nomenclature, i.e. recounting exactly which parts of the army were facing specific parts of the opposing army at a certain time. There is a role for this sort of historical analysis of course, perhaps as an aide memoire for a specialist in this area. But it does mean that the book is not really for the general reader interested in the Eastern Front and will probably disappoint those more used to the narrative drive of an Antony Beevor or Richard Overy. Each chapter has a summary at the end and the general reader could probably get a reasonable overall picture of the events by reading those, plus the Conclusions chapter. So overall a bit disappointing from my perspective. ( )