Next up for our military book club is Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 by Catherine Merridale (US edition, published by Henry Holt & Co.).

Catherine Merridale is the author of the 2002 book Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia, a book that “explores Russian perceptions of death and afterlife from before the Bolshevik Revolution, through both world wars and the great famines of the 1930s and into the present.”

Ivan’s War promises to be an excellent follow-up to the club’s previous book, Nemesis, Max Hasting’s analysis of the final year of war in the Pacific. Moreover, after Ivan’s War we’ll be reading Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer’s tale of the Eastern Front through the eyes of a German soldier. The juxtaposition of these two books will undoubtedly be enlightening.