Showalter provided a succinct description of the suicide. Only an estimated 10,000 Russian soldiers escaped, Samsonov was not one of them. Samsonov went to battle with 180,000 men, by the time it was done, over 90% of them had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The book would prove useful for me since I needed to find out more details concerning the suicide of General Alexander Samsonov, the commander of the Russian 2nd Army which was destroyed in the battle. Showalter does a fine job of explaining the strategy, tactics, and outcome of Tannenberg. There are over 400 pages filled with an infinite number of details that interpret the battle. It certainly does not disappoint in that regard. The book I grabbed, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires by Dennis Showalter, has a well-deserved reputation for density. I realized this invaluable aspect once again when I went in search of books to answer a specific question about the Battle of Tannenberg on the Eastern Front at the beginning of World War I. To be completely honest, this was the reason I bought most of these books. The best chance for cracking a neglected books is to use it as a reference work. Sometimes I will stare at specific books packed on the shelves and wonder when I will finally get around to reading at least a page or two of each one. Besieged by books would be an apt description of my current status. I do not own my books as much as they own me. It may be gentle, but it is madness all the same. Surrounding myself with stacks of books means I am something of a bibliophile, an obsession defined by the title of an excellent book about the subject, “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion For Books” by Nicholas Basbanes. It is the only way I can manage to keep from being overwhelmed. Working my way into books with this method comes at the expense of thoroughness. The power of perusal provides a window into disparate regions, subjects, and time periods. This is the kind of curiosity that easily goes off-kilter. Curiosity often gets the better of me as I bound from the medieval to the modern, from the Balkans to the Black Sea, from eastern Germany to eastern Ukraine, from Byzantium or the Baltic. This works rather well, except for the fact that I find myself skipping from one subject to the next without any logical plan. As I get older and the list of unread books on my shelves grows, I have learned to read specific chapters of a book to find what intrigues me the most. I buy way too many books, books that I will never have the time to read from cover to cover.
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