Reflection on Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson

     Dawnshard is a Stormlight Archive novella that advances elements of the Adonalsium plot by bringing us the concept of the Dawnshard. I would say that this was the least interesting of the Stormlight Archive books, but that's not saying much because they're all great. This one just could have been better in its explanations of the Dawnshard concept and it could have had a more interesting sailing journey. I would compare it to C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawntreader, a book with a similar length that is also about a journey at sea, which is, in my opinion, much better.

    On the other hand, we the book brought out a lot of new information about Rysn and explored the Aimians, who are a super interesting race of "hordelings," these small alien crab things that can form up to imitate a person. That was good world-building. I guess I would say I really just don't like Lopen as a character, and not much happened in the books, which were two big weaknesses for me. I would also say that this felt like a YA novel, which was obviously not intending me as the audience if that's the case.

Reflection on Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

    You know I hadn't read the subtitle of this book until just now and I was about to say, "You know, this isn't really a book about languages as much as it is a history of the world seen through the lens of linguistics." I guess I was right, lol. This was an excellent book that my sister got for me for Hannukah that I really couldn't put down. It is extremely well done and probably an early contender for one of my top books of the year.

    The book moves chronologically, starting with the semitic language, whose origin is unconfirmed, but may have started in modern Ethiopia/Somalia and moved into the Arabian Peninsula. It's a very cool chapter because Ostler shows the similarities between Akkadian, Aramaic, and modern Arabic. He shows us that Aramaic became the lingua franca of the ancient world, as the Persians adopted it as an official language, helping it to spread as far as modern-day Pakistan.

    Then, Ostler does a chapter that covers both ancient Egyptian language as well as ancient Chinese. Interestingly, he writes that hieroglyphics developed from pictures made by artists that developed phonetic meaning, so that the word for "knife" would also work for "enough" and "nephew." Compare this to Mesopotamia, where writing developed from number tallies. Chinese, writes Ostler, has no phonetic element at all, making it completely neutral in regard to dialects. While pronunciations of a character may vary, the written character is understood by all Chinese speakers, and will not drift and change on the page like pronunciation will on the tongue. On the other hand, this does make Chinese more difficult to learn than phonetic systems. Despite that difficulty, Chinese remains an influential and widely-spoken language outside of China. In the Philippines, Chinese people are 1% of the population but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia, the numbers are 4% and 75% and in Malaysia it is 32% and 60%. In Thailand, overseas Chinese account for at least half the wealth. If you combined the wealth of the 51 million overseas Chinese, their GDP would be worth $700 billion. 

    Ultimately, when comparing Chinese and Egyptian, the biggest difference is that Chinese survived and Egyptian did not, even though both were invaded many times. In Egypt, the language linked the people to their religion. When traditional polytheism was replaced by Christianity, Egyptians took their language as the Christian language. That made it a target for Muslim invaders, who sought to destroy it. In China, on the other hand, no new religion came in, and with such a massive population, China was always able to "swallow up" its invaders. While the Egyptians changed to become Arabs and speak Arabic, it was the Mongols and other invaders who became Chinese and adopted Chinese culture and language.

    The chapter on Greek was very interesting to me and I took a lot of notes. For example, where the various names from the Greeks originate: "Hellenes" is the name the Greeks use for themselves and comes from the name of Achilles' people in the Iliad; "Yauna" is the Persian name and refers to "Ionia," the region of western Turkey where Greek colonists resided; "Graii" is the name the Romans used, regerring to a small town in southern Boeotia. I also learned that Greek used to be a tonal language, but lost the tones over time. Now the Greeks stress the syllable that used to have the high tone.

    The sections on the deaths of Latin were also very interesting. I learned that in the 8th Century. Charlemagne invited Alcuin of York to come and standardize Latin for use in masses. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Latin had been devolving into its Romance variants, and now they were beginning to lose mutual intelligibility. By standardizing Latin, mass was the same all over Western Europe. However, this meant that average people could no longer understand their priests, a problem that would return centuries later in the Reformation. We have very few examples of Romance language before it was solidified in the various modern Romance languages, but one of the surviving bits of writing is a sort of teleprompter for Ludwig and Charles, kings and grandsons of Charlemagne, who swore to support one another. They swore in Latin with a translation in the vernacular, which is similar, but quite different. 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Italy and "veal" come from the same Greek word. The Greeks named the peninsula "(w)italoí, meaning "land of yearling cattle." This was a dialectical vaiant of "etaloi," borrowed into Italian as vituli, now in English as "veal."
• Eucharist comes from the Greek term for "I thank."
• 7% of English vocabulary is of Norse origin, including words such as, "take, get, keep, leg, sky, skin, and skirt."
• In the Middle Ages, Latin was referred to as "grammatica" and the vernacular language was known as "idioma," which was Greek for "peculiarity." I know that now, "idioma" is the Spanish word for "language."
• Apparently Columbus did not call Native Americans "Indians" for very long. He arrived in October 1492 and thought he was in China. By November he thought he was in India, and by December, he realized he wasn't. He literally stopped using the term "indios" by mid-December of that year but the term stuck.
• In Paraguay, a 1996 survey found that 96% of the population was fluent in Guarani and 53 % were monolingual in it, while only 2% were monolingual Spanish speakers.
• Ostler argues that languages of trade and business are more ephemeral whereas immigration brings about more significant linguistic changes.

Reflection on Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation by Sonia Hirt

             Hirt wrote a really good book here, especially good in its comparisons of American zoning to international practices, mainly in Europe. Hirt also includes sections analyzing the historical development of zoning practices, but those didn’t interest me quite as much.

            Hirt writes that Americans favored zoning because they thought it was straightforward in its constraints of private actions, because they perceived it ats public protections of private property, and because zoning rules guaranteed an idealized housing form in the detached single-family home. Originally, zoning was one of the weaker tools used by German bureaucrats in city planning, as German cities could own land, tax heavily, and construct housing themselves. None of these options are nearly as strong for municipalities in the United States, and so zoning became a critical tool.

            One of the explicit arguments made in favor of zoning at the beginning of the 20th century was that it was a way to raise property values. It still is. In the aggregate, it seems like (although I don’t have data to back this up) that zoning raises property values more than a lack of zoning due to the certainty it provides in terms of what other things can be built nearby. However, what is good for the owner is not good for the renter, as high property values are the same as a high cost of housing, creating a direct conflict.

Comparisons to Other Countries

In one of the most interesting portions of the book, Hirt compares the land use laws of the United States to those of Europe. In their large cities, the vast majority of people live in multifamily structures: 81% in Berlin, 97% in Rome and Madrid, and 99% in Paris. The only city in the US that comes close is New York at 80%, dropping to 62% if we include the metropolis as a whole. Chicago hits 65%, Seattle 46%, New Orleans 31%, and Philadelphia 25%. New York’s metro area is five times lower than Prague’s and ten times lower than Mexico City’s. The key to understanding the European countries’ differences in land use is that none of them give nearly so privileged a position to the detached single-family home.

            England

            England and Wales follow a “discretionary” system that does not presume that ownership rights grant development rights. Even if someone plans to develop on land within the development scheme, it is not a given that they have the right to do so. In the discretionary system, local authorities have the discretion to allow or not allow any and all development. There is no system of regulations that can guarantee a right to build if follows. Instead, everything has to go through public officials, who take into account the public considerations of the development and may not consider the effects on land values or private gain/loss. Hirt says that England is exceptional among the countries she considered because of its extremely centralized and hierarchical planning system, tilted heavily towards private sector goals.

            One of the most important things about English land use is the mandatory greenbelts that exist around the cities. These preserve the English countryside, rather than allow it to turn into sprawling subdivisions. It will be interesting to see how that develops in South Florida, where the Everglades may act as a sort of greenbelt. Supposedly there will be no more expansion west in South Florida, so up is the only way to go.

            France

            The French system includes Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Greece, Italy, and France. Hirt says it is one member of the “Napoleonic family” of land use, which also includes Germany and Sweden. France is somewhat less authoritarian than England. While all private development requires permission, France grants permission as long as the private party follows regulations in advance, unlike England, where the local authority will still exercise discretion even if the private party follows all the rules.

            The French system is therefore more similar to the American system with key differences. First, France has much more fragmented local government, with about the same number of municipalities as the USA in a country five times smaller. France practices local planning, but also regional planning (more than the USA). But the bigger difference is that France’s zones are much broader. For example, the General Urban zone overs most of Paris and allows for houses, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafes, and offices. The key determinant of building in Paris is not the land or building use. Instead it is floor-to-area ratio. Within General Urban Zone, there are two subzones, “residential protection sector” and “sector where mixing housing and employment is encouraged.” However, residential protection is a misnomer to American ears, because both allow for mixed uses, just a higher percentage of residential in “residential protection sectors.” This allows for French cities to be mixed instead of dividing them into several zones with single functions.

Germany

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are part of the German planning family, which is really extremely similar to the French family. In Germany, planning occurs at all levels: federal, state, regional, and local. Like England, Germany highly protects non-urbanized areas from further development, a concept completely foreign to Americans, who will see subdivisions built in the middle of nowhere, sprawling out. As a result, development is limited mostly to urban areas and the areas immediately surrounding them.

Like France, the German segregation of land uses is much softer than in the USA. There is no exclusive single-family zone, and the “small-scale residential” areas include two-family homes, farms, small shops, restaurants, crafts, and nondisruptive industries. “Exclusively residential” areas permit all types of dwellings and even sometimes allow for shops, crafts, hotels, and civic buildings. By US standards, this is mixed-use.

Sweden

Sweden is part of the Scandinavian planning family, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. The national government issues advisory plans and requires regional planning in select areas. Probably due to the fact that Scandinavian countries are often made up of people in far-apart cities, the localities have more control over land use than in other counties. Like in Germany or in France, municipalities prepare plans, and if developers comply with them, permission is granted to develop. Like in Germany, there are two plans: one general, nonspecific, and nonbinding plan that covers the whole territory, and then dozens or hundreds of smaller, legally binding plans that cover specific areas. Like in all the others, there is no specific “single-family” use, and while permits are required to subdivide a property, they are almost always granted.

Russia

Russia’s municipalities are required by law to adopt general plans that are nonbinding, like in the United States and the other European countries. However, the government exercises more actual control by selecting which private developers get to do the biggest projects. Monofunctionality is out of the ordinary. Residential zones allow social and commercial uses so long as they are not detrimental to the residential environment. One similarity to the United States is that there is single-family zoning, however, there is no single-family, detached zoning. Height, bulk, and design rules are more important than the actual use of the land.

Hirt also covers a few countries outside of Europe briefly:

Japan

In Japan, the national government maintains a very strong role in land use law. Japan created similar land use categorizations as other countries, the familiar residential, commercial, and industrial. However, like all countries except the USA, Japan never completely excluded other land uses. Besides restricting heavy manufacturing solely to industrial zones and mandating that the noisiest commercial uses be solely in commercial zones, the zones mix frequently. Like Germany and Sweden have two levels of plans, Japan has three: strategic plans, master plans, and implementation regulations. Like in Russia and the rest of Europe, the focus of Japanese zoning is not to separate land uses, but to control based on form, bulk, and density. All residential districts allow additional land uses, and there is no mandated single-family housing.

Australia

Australian planning is conducted at all levels of government, and regulatory schemes at town and local levels must conform to each other, like in Europe but unlike in the USA. Australia uses a single-family home designation, making it similar to the USA, but they are still not as strict as most American plans.

Canada

This is the system most similar to American zoning. Provinces have the greatest power over planning, while localities create the actual general community plans and detailed community plans. The Canadian provinces have autonomy, so each has somewhat different practices, like Australian or American states. Canada is a hybrid of the English, American, and continental European models, with elements of all three. Like the US, Canada has restrictive single-family zones, however, “secondary suites” (known as accessory dwelling units in America) are generally allows, as well as daycare centers and bed and breakfasts, things that would be somewhat radical in the US setting. Another critical difference is that the even lowest-density districts still require smaller lot sizes than we usually have in the US, making them must more dense than comparable American communities.

Back to America

            The most unique element of American zoning is how intensely local it is. The US model, while closest to Canada and Australia, has far weaker states than the provinces and states in those countries when it comes to land use. America lacks strong federal control mechanisms because of this, and government power is further weakened by strong protections against government taking of private land. But the fundamentally unique aspect of American land-use is the privileged position of mandated single-family zoning.

Conclusion

            Hirt makes a very convincing case for changing some aspects of American zoning. One is that some of the polluting and hazardous activities that most zoning laws prohibit may not longer be so problematic. For example, a lot of cities still ban laundries due to fumes and restaurants due to fires thanks to century-old ordinances, but those risks aren’t nearly as big anymore. Other ordinances are based on old myths, like that children who live above grocery stores will get diseases from flies. Now, grocery stores don’t even attract flies indoors in the air conditioning. Additionally, legal separation of homes and work is outdated now that people so often work from home.

            Many supposed benefits of the strict style of American zoning never played out. No one has ever shown a clear causation between separation of physical spaces and a reduction in crime. Jane Jacobs has even posited that it does the opposite by emptying certain areas at certain times of day. Additionally, zoning causes us to drive much more, reducing public health due to bad air quality and crashes; more driving also means more climate change. Americans drive far more than Europeans and spend more time in traffic too.

            Ultimately, Hirt’s recommendations make a lot of sense. She points out the irony of the incredibly strict American zoning style is that housing is so strictly residential because it is so strictly commercial. Because Americans are so mobile and because we often see houses as investments to be sold, most people demand the ironclad assurances of zoning to raise their property values and make as much money possible from the eventual sale.

 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• America is not actually a leading country in homeownership. Hirt says that home ownership rose dramatically abroad after WWII, and now the USA is 17th out of 26 “economically advanced countries” in home ownership.
• The Netherlands and many Scandinavian countries practice aggressive urban containment by purchasing land at the edges of cities below market values. Then, they have power to hold onto the land or sell it with conditions to meet public goals.
• While other cities had been narrowing in on it for a while, the first zoning ordinance creating mandated single-family detached housing was passed in Berkely, California.

Reflection on The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor

     The Fall of Berlin is a good follow-up to Beevor's Stalingrad, but definitely not as engaging a read due to the subject matter. Stalingrad is interesting because it is the turning of the tide on the Eastern Front. The fall of Berlin is less interesting because it is a fait accompli.

    The scale of the Russian offensive post-Stalingrad is mind-blowing. It was 6.7 million men in the Red Army from the Baltic to the Adriatic, TWICE the number of Nazi invaders who went to Russia. The effect of this is even greater because the Russians, moving west, would be concentrating their troops on the central European plain, whereas the Germans would need to be ever expanding as they entered Asia, especially when passing the Black Sea to the south and the Baltic Sea to the north. In front of the Soviet invasion was a refugee crisis in the German-occupied territories, with 19 million refugees by February of 1945, with up to 50,000 arriving in Berlin every day ahead of the Red Army.

    Meanwhile, Hitler was completely devastated and could not have cared less about the lives of Germans. In ordering the destruction of bridges, Hitler said, "If the war is lost, the people will also be lost. It is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival... For the nation has proved to be weak, and the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East." Unsurprisingly, most Germans were not so absolutist, and absolutely planned to outlive the war. For the military, it was a difficult choice. One German lieutenant wrote, "to be an officer means almost always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knights Cross, a birchwood cross, and a court martial."

    A major theme of the book is the Americans' naivete and the Russians willingness to use it to advance further faster. Stalin was dead-set on extending the Soviet Union as far west as possible, and largely succeeded by telling Americans the advance on Berlin was just a reconnaissance mission. the British urged the Americans to move faster and moved to Denmark quickly so that it wouldn't fall to the Russians, but Eisenhower was resolute that he wouldn't sacrifice American lives for speed. For this reason, the Russians went all the way into Germany and Czechoslovakia as well as the Balkans. This really makes you think about how Russia needs massive disruption and conflict in Europe to achieve such gains. The Russian Revolution couldn't do it. Only a massive invasion of Russia, followed by a counter-offensive, could lead to sweeping over the continent. Europe needs to be highly unstable for Russia to do this, as the only two times I can think of in the modern era that Russians have successfully invaded Europe are WWII and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Otherwise I can only think of the Golden Horde and the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Attila the Hun almost a thousand years before that.

    Socially speaking, there was madness as the Russians got closer, bringing with them waves of mass rape to the women of Germany. Beevor writes that ahead of the Russian advance, young Germans were having lots of sex, as they knew they could die soon, and the German girls preferred to lose their virginity on their own terms to a German rather than by rape. By April this was common, The Russians were of course indiscriminate, raping not just German women, but liberated Jews and also some of their own women as well as the "liberated" people of Eastern Europe. Russian women started to grow despondent, knowing that, with so many Russian men dead, they would be a generation of spinsters. After their rapes, women then had to deal with German men, who regularly divorced them, cried, or refused to talk about it. Or all three. German men were immensely shamed at their inability to protect their women, which further damaged their relationships. The line of consent was also blurred. Sometimes, Russian soldiers would simply offer food in exchange for a sexual relationship, which is inherently coercive. In Berlin, cigarettes were used as currency, so one reason we may hear more about Russian rapes than Americans is that Americans were given nearly limitless cartons of cigarettes, meaning they could trade them for sex instead of using force. Beevor describes rape as evolving in 1945 from the forceful to the simply coercive, to the trading, and finally to a form of cohabitation in which Soviet officers settled in with German "occupation wives" who replaced their Soviet "campaign wives."

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Apparently Eva Braun was totally unknown outside Hitler's court, and hardly anyone who hadn't visited the high command knew who she was.
• I had never heard of the greatest maritime disaster in history: the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustoff, in which between 5,300 and 7,400 German refugees died when a Soviet submarine sunk the ship.
• The Red Army had to issue an order prohibiting soldiers from riding bicycles because so many Russian soldiers were injuring themselves with the plundered bikes.
• Hitler was very into Frederick the Great and kept a portrait of him in the bunker.
• The USSR was very skeptical of its soldiers who had spent time being exposed to Nazi propaganda in prison camps. As recently as 1998, declaration forms to join a research institute in Russia asked whether a member of the applicant's family had been in an "enemy prison camp."
• Germans were completely oblivious to the facts of the war and learned a lot when Berlin was taken. They had thought the United States declared war on Germany when it was the other way around, and they had no idea about their bombing campaigns against Britain.

Reflection on Oathbringer (Stormlight Archive #3)

     Another great Stormlight Archive book, this one even longer than the last two. Oathbringer was an epic that took out characters from the high mountaintops of Urithiru to the besieged city of Kholinar, and from the darkness of Shadesmar to Thaylen City. All in all solid book and I still enjoy the series very much.

    A big highlight of the early part of this book is Pattern. That character is just really funny to me. I like when he "hums happily" or "buzzes happily" and his reactions to human life. Like when he learns that chaperones are supposed to stop humans from doing anything inappropriate, he asks if they mean dividing by zero. Funny stuff.

    This book also has the big reveal of why the Recreance happened, which I won't spoil here. I would only say as I finish this book that I don't know how Sanderson is going to keep going with this. I feel like we have already gotten to extremely high stakes that will be hard to top.

Miscellaneous:

• Why do musicspren trail after Ryshadium?

Reflection on Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor

     This is an extremely complete and full look at the fighting between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russian in Stalingrad and the buildup beforehand from the German invasion. The book is written very well, taking the story from Hitler's strategy sessions at the Berghof to the starving German soldiers decorating their bunkers for Christmas, to the Russian soldiers writing letters home, up to Stalin himself anxiously pushing his generals to launch a counterattack. The book is awesome, and classic dad-history that I am very glad I read.

Operation Barbarossa and Getting to Stalingrad   

    The Germans made two big pushes against Russia in World War Two. The first was a complete surprise in June 1941, when Hitler suddenly revoked the pact he made with Stalin and invaded Russia. In 1941, the Germans made huge advances, seizing all of the Baltic states and most of Ukraine advancing through Crimea. But they were too late in attacking. By launching their attack on June 22, 1941, they started too late and when the rains came in September, turning roads to mud, the attack stalled as they then waited out the rains and the winter. Below is a map of Operation Barbarossa as it played out:

    In 1942, the Germans launched a second offensive, called Case Blue or Operation Blue. Controversially, Hitler chose to invade southwards, attacking the Caucasus with the goal of seizing oil supplies in Baku, Azerbaijan. His generals, such as Guderian, argued that they should seize Moscow, to cut Russia's communications and logistical hub. However, partially because of the oil, and partially out of fear of following in Napoleon's footsteps, Hitler refused. Here is a map of Operation Blue:

    So you can see that the Germans made it to Stalingrad (now Volgograd) on the Volga River, but no further. Critically, Stalingrad was not only the river connection to the Caspian Sea, but also the rail connection to the south of Russia. To take Stalingrad would be to cut the Soviet Union off from its south, and so it became a struggle of life and death for Russia. But problematically, Hitler launched his offensives towards the south (Caucasus) and towards the east (Stalingrad) simultaneously, weakening each one. On Sunday, August 23, 1942, German forces reached Stalingrad.

The First Attack

    The Germans launched air attacks to destroy the defenses and morale of Russian soldiers charged with destroying the city. It worked. Soldiers deserted in whole groups from the front lines until commanders adopted policies of decimation, one commander shooting every tenth man at point-blank range until his magazine was empty.

    The German commander was Friedrich Paulus, controlling the troops not just in Stalingrad but across 130 miles of front, from the Don to the Volga. Despite having the largest formation in the German Army with a third of a million men, Paulus could only keep one division in reserve while the rest were kept on the front lines.

    Problematically for the Germans, when they reached Stalingrad they lost their blitzkrieg advantages of speed and maneuver. There, they were forced to adopt older techniques, resorting to trench warfare, as so many buildings had been destroyed by their air bombardment that even at the beginning there was little shelter for the large army. The combat at Stalingrad was in close quarters. Germans called the fighting "rattenkrieg" because they fought in cellars and sewers against constant ambushes from basements, wall remnants, ruins, and hidden bunkers. Because the German air attack had done such damage to the city, they couldn't move through it, facing huge obstacles from fallen and bombed out buildings blocking many streets. This slowed them down and aided the Russians in defense.

    The Russians, commanded by Chuikov, funneled and fragmented German assaults by using strengthened positions with machine guns to channel Germans into alleyways and streets where camouflaged tanks were waiting, half-buried in rubble. The Russian sappers had the highest casualty rate of all, as they were the ones who had to crawl out at night to lay anti-tank mines, or sometimes run out in front of a tank to drop a mine as it advanced. Their motto was, "Make a mistake and no more dinners."

Fortress Stalingrad

    Because the Germans reached Stalingrad at the end of August, there was some time to fight before cold set in, but not much. Germans became demoralized. From their letters home, we learn that they are often in disbelief at what was happening as their attack stalled in the city. Meanwhile, Russian soldiers were openly expressing their discontent in letters home and revealing state secrets. This greatly distressed the NKVD, the Russian intelligence service.

    Luckily for the Russians, Hitler refused to believe that they had any more armies in reserve, and additionally, weak Russian tank attacks across the front lines made the Germans underestimate Russian capacities. Because of this, the Germans would fail to anticipate the Russian counterattack in November. During the summer of 1942, Hitler's generals had informed him that the Soviets were producing 1,200 tanks a month while the Germans only made 500, but Hitler did not believe it. In fact, the numbers were even higher, with the Soviets producing 2,200 a month. Aircraft production on the Russian side had also been increasing throughout 1942. 

    When the Russians counterattacked in November, the Germans were surprised. To prepare for a Russian counterattack, Paulus would have needed to withdraw tanks from the city to keep in reserve, but this preparation would have been a disobedience of Hitler's orders to through everything at the city. When the Russians finally did counter-attack, Paulus took almost no notice of it, and did nothing to respond. During the Russian encirclement, there was still time for the Germans on the outside to get between Russian armies if they had a strong mobile reserve, but they did not, and so Stalingrad became surrounded. 

    At first, the Russians were unaware how large a force they had surrounded, guessing around 86,000 German soldiers when in fact, including German allies, there were about 290,000 men. The suffering of these men would be enormous. One event that seemed all-consuming was the lice outbreak. The lice lived in clumps on the living men, and could be seen leaving the flesh of the recently deceased en masse.

    With his soldiers trapped in Stalingrad, Hitler's mood changed. Rather than holding forth at his dinner table to give longwinded speeches to his sycophants, Hitler was silent. He trembled and stared down as his soup. However, he showed no regret for the lives lost, only thinking of ways to raise the stakes and win the war.

Civilians in Stalingrad

    Unlike the soldiers, no one was giving civilians rations to keep them alive in the city. Despite that, after five months of battle, 10,000 civilians remained, with at least 1,000 of them being children. From the first air raids on August 24 to September 10, 300,000 civilians were evacuated to the east bank of the Volga while 50,000 remained on the west. The scenes of evacuation must have been horrible to witness. One ferry was packed with people desperate to leave at the end of evacuation and made it about 50 yards before being hit by a bomb and sunk in front of all those still waiting on the west bank to escape. For many civilians in the towns west of Stalingrad, no escape would be possible, as the Germans moved too quickly and cut them off.

    The Germans mad use of the orphans of Stalingrad to do dangerous tasks such as filling water bottles in the river where they would be exposed to snipers. The orphans would do this in exchange for a crust of bread. However, then the Russian army realized what was happening, they issued the order to shoot any children seen on such missions. When the battle was over, only nine children were reunited with their parents. The rest were sent off to state orphanages or given work clearing the city. Most of them were swollen with hunger. One American aid worker wrote that the children "cringed in corners, afraid to speak, to even look people in the face."

After Stalingrad
    Once Paulus' Sixth Army surrendered, the people of Russia had no doubt they would win the war. The morale boost was so great the Stalingrad veterans were divided as much as possible to influence other units. For the Germans who fought at Stalingrad, the suffering and starvation was not over. Of the 91,000 who surrendered, half would be dead by springtime, mostly from starvation. While the Soviets technically made allowance for food for the POWs, bureaucracy, corruption, and indifference meant that it would not arrive, or at least not enough. Very few of the German soldiers captured would return home.

Conclusion

    This is honestly a really rough book to read. The talk of deserters, disease, and starvation is rampant and obviously this is just a tale of immense human suffering. That said, the book is excellent and very well-written. Definitely a classic read for anyone who wants to know more about World War Two and the Eastern Front.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• When the Russians struck out under Zhukov, the Axis divisions that bore the brunt of the attack were Romanians.
• Doctors and medical workers ran out of blood and gave so much of their own that they frequently collapsed.
• There is a weird quote from Hitler when he was railing against Paulus for not fighting to the last man and then killing himself: "When you consider that a woman has the pride to leave, to lock herself in, and to shoot herself right away just because she has heard a few insulting remarks, then I can't have any respect for a soldier who is afraid of that and prefers to go into captivity." Beevor doesn't remark on it, but I think Hitler was specifically remembering his niece, Geli Raubal, who lived with Hitler from 1929 to 1931. While unconfirmed, it seems that many historians suspect they had a sexual relationship, but that she killed herself, either because they were expecting a child or because Hitler kept her as a prisoner in his apartment. She died of a gunshot would through her lung in 1931. I cannot help but think Hitler is describing this event.

Reflection on Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson

    So I just finished yet another book set in the Stormlight Archive universe on the planet of Roshar. This is not a numbered part of the series however. Edgedancer is almost like a very long version of one of the interludes that Sanderson uses in his books. In this one, Lift, a Reshi thief, continues to further develop her powers of friction-manipulation and healing in a labyrinth city cut into the ground. She is hunted by Darkness, a name she uses for the herald of justice, Nan. You could probably skip this book if you were reading the series, but I wouldn't, because Lift will supposedly become a major character later and it was just fun to check out this weird city where people trade information and wear these long toga-like robes.