What We’re Reading: Vasily Grossman, Eric Kandel, Longform.org, and More (New Yorker)

_Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week._ In a way I'm glad I didn't read "**A Writer at War**," drawn from Vasily Grossman's notebooks and newspaper articles from 1941 to 1945, when it was first published back in 2005. It would have been a bit demoralizing to come across the work of this Jewish Soviet writer when I was still covering the Iraq War. What any war correspondent aspires to do while falling well short, Grossman succeeds in doing brilliantly: stare death in the face without turning away (as he said to his editor, "We have to follow the ruthless truth of war"); be accepted by the combatants enough to convey their full humanity with no sentimentality; have the range to describe with equal command the huge armor battle of Kursk, the humor of a peasant woman who had troops billeted in her home, and the character of each river as the front moved west from the Volga to the Oder. For four years Grossman saw everything, from Stalingrad to Berlin, and he set it all down with the sympathy and dispassion of the great novelist that he ...

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