Mr. McKay’s rich narrative and descriptive gifts provide us with an elegant yet unflinching account of that terrible night. Leaning on eyewitness accounts and memoirs, material he arranges with skill and sensitivity, he brings us unnervingly close to the visceral horror of the firestorm, while devoting due attention to the fears and moral conflicts affecting the British and American attackers, from the bomber crews to the senior commanders. He also describes the clearing and the eventual rebuilding of the city, which, from May 1945, was first occupied by the Soviet army, then administered by the Stalinist regime’s German minions.

MacKay’s engrossing account of Dresden’s citizens, in the moments before, during, and after the bombings, describe a community trying to manage everyday life in Nazi Germany until a cataclysm interrupted its routine.

...historians, journalists and television producers have returned to the Dresden firestorm time and again.

McKay’s harrowing narrative conjures the 'satanic music' of passing aircraft and the burning of corpses whose stench was still recalled years later, all set against the daily malevolence of life under the Gestapo.

... vivid and exhaustive.