["Horses of Anger"] is an extraordinary book to have been written for the young reader. It is uncompromising in the difficulty of its vocabulary, the integrity and complexity of its historical facts, and the gruesomeness of its detail.

The hero of "Horses of Anger"" is a German boy, Hans Amann. Hans is inducted into that pathetic army of schoolboys whose task it was to fight a war the Third Reich had lost….

The virtue of this book lies in its avoidance of oversimplification, false drama, heroics. Nazism is shown, not as the massive entity of total horror which it was possible to see from the outside at the time, and which it is impossible even for the Germans to miss now, looking back—but as it came piecemeal to the Amanns, as one aspect of their many-faceted lives. The members of the family are shown to have various and changing attitudes toward Hitler. (p. 2)

This is a well-researched, well-thought-out book. Why then, is it not a good book? The answer is simple and unkind: Mr. Forman doesn't write well.

Hans's re-education is not only imperceptible in the good sense, in the sense that our changes of mind and heart come upon us while we are not aware. It is, unfortunately, also imperceptible to the reader, because Mr. Forman has not sufficiently entered his young hero's mind with his imagination. I have praised the book for the avoidance of false drama and must now chastise it for the absence of any drama whatsoever. It is remarkable that I laid down a book in which a war has been lost, an Uncle Konrad maimed, a battalion of children destroyed, Hans's best friend burned up and Siegfried stabbed in the back, with a sense that nothing happened. Nothing had happened to my emotions.

Mr. Forman's scenes have a way of missing the point they are making. I do not mean that he frequently describes a large even out of the corner of the eye of the boy skiing down a mountain, taking a bath, kidding with friends. We know that it is just so that calamities do come upon us. It is rather that the descriptions of skiing, of bathing, of kidding miss the mark….

I believe that Mr. Forman knows he is not writing his scenes from life. We feel him searching for the strong, live verb and coming up with the wrong one. The houses "vomit" out their insides. Mr. Forman wants to face us with violence and disgust—but the action of exploding, collapsing houses is not that of vomit, so that instead of drawing us into the scene, the false word stops us in doubt….

A scene, a book that has not been written well has, in effect, remained unwritten. It has failed to happen.

And yet, I cannot leave "Horses of Anger" here. I ask myself if I would give this book to teenage children of my own and I answer with a definite, if unenthusiastic, yes.

We keep discovering, with unreasonable shock, that the growing generation is totally ignorant of the times that convulsed our own lives. Their education in recent history, if it happens at all, will be piecemeal and erratic, like Hans's re-education. They will gain insights from other books, will be moved, perhaps, by what they already know in their own imaginations. I recommend that they get the complex facts from Mr. Forman's honest account. (p. 46)