Stalin: Russia's Man of Steel

I absolutely love Albert Marrin. He is an excellent author for history, especially for high school. He has a pleasant writing style, and includes many detailed examples. I read Stalin before I had my thirteen year old read it, and I was impressed. Marrin not only includes a biography of Stalin, but he adds much information about the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Hitler, WWII, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Much of Marrin's histories are this way. He takes a big chunk of history and puts it all together so we can see the entire picture. Excellent read!!

If you teach history to the middle grades or have a child of that age interested in history, you know that reading material more advanced than the 40-page survey intended for third graders yet not quite so heavy as to be called a "tome" can be very hard to find. Marrin's work fills the bill. I first learned of Marrin when I acquired The Yanks are Coming: The United States in the First World War for a unit on WWI for my homeschoolers. A life-long history buff, I found that book to be the single best thing I've read on WWI. Albert Marrin, chairman of the history department at Yeshiva University, is not only knowledgeable about his subject matter, he has the ability to write about history in a way that makes the reader want to keep reading and is adept at providing the big picture view of things. Readers of Stalin: Man of Steel are presented with a decent history of the rise of the USSR along with Stalin's biography. One note: Stalin was written in 1988, before the fall of the USSR. Educators will want to make mention of that, as a couple of things Marrin speaks of as "continuing to this day" have since changed.