This book is an excellent sampling from the wartime reporting of the Soviet writer Vassily Grossman. “A Writer at War” not only has Grossman’s often grim, sometimes lyrical but always superb descriptions of the Eastern Front in WWII, it also has excellent wrap-around explanatory text and footnotes by the British military historian Antony Beevor. Grossman covered the Red Army throughout WWII on the Eastern Front for the Red Army newspaper. He never shrank from danger and was often on the front lines, especially in the summer and fall of 1941 during the months of retreat from the German onslaught, and was nearly captured several times. There is tremendous, sharply-observed detail in his writing about the soldiers and the suffering of civilians. And his piece on the Treblinka death camp is chilling in its almost novelistic approach to explaining the monstrous way the Nazis fooled people into thinking they were heading east to farm before being brought to the camp and gassed. Grossman was Jewish and tried to write about the deaths of Jews in the war and the Holocaust, but Stalin and Soviets authorities wanted only to describe the suffering of Soviet citizens, “no special commemoration of Jews.” After the war Stalin purged many Jews during the times of “the little terror” and “the doctor’s plot” and Grossman would likely have been killed as well, but luckily for him, Stalin died in 1953 just as the terror apparatus was gearing up purge him. Grossman also wrote novels about the war, the most famous being “Life and Fate,” which revolves around the Battle of Stalingrad.