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anti_formalist12's review against another edition
5.0
The collection is a fascinating insight into some of Grossman's lesser known works, but the center of this work is Grossman's writing on the Holocaust. His article "The Hell of Treblinka" is about as harrowing an account as one will find. The beauty of Grossman's writing combined with the agonizing descriptions would overwhelm anyone. And the letters that he wrote to his mother years after she and Grossman's entire home city of Berdychiv were massacred by the Nazis, are nothing short of heartbreaking. Death permeates this collection, so the final article concerning Grossman's thinking on cemeteries feels particularly apt.
mark_lm's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to read his best known work, "Life and Fate", but it wasn't available as an e-book. Some of this volume is mostly of historical interest. I don't think it says much for someone if they only became disillusioned with Stalin when they discovered that he was antisemitic.
hannahrisha's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
jaclyn_youngblood's review against another edition
5.0
I meant to read The Road shortly after I finished Life and Fate a few years ago. It wasn't until this year's Harvard Bookstore Warehouse sale that I came across a beautiful paperback copy and had a chance to sit down with Grossman's work. It was well worth the wait. I am enamored of his clarity of voice, and I found the editorial touches quite useful. The Hell of Treblinka was one of the best pieces of nonfiction about German extermination camps that I've read. Not that you're looking for the best of for that category. [...] I would recommend this to anyone looking for a meta filter for looking at Soviet everyday life.
cjf's review against another edition
5.0
I recommend that we all read all of Vasily Grossman right this instant. The Road is a great place to start, if you don't want to hop right into Life and Fate, which is a fucking masterpiece.
cloudslikethis's review against another edition
4.0
Such good writing but the subjects were very difficult to read about sometimes. I probably made some very strange faces while reading this. It was nice to see some female characters as most of the stories we've read for this class are about men.
zachkuhn's review
Yeah it took me over a year to finish this because...Grossman makes the intolerable even more painful, more raw, more real. "The Hell of Treblinka" is just gutting, published a couple of months after the Soviet Army made it to what was a camp but was by then just a crime scene. Not a burial ground because the Nazis had exhumed the hundreds of thousands of bodies to burn them so that they could deny everything later.
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