The Man with the Iron Heart

By: Harry Turtledove

Narrated by: William Dufris

In the real world, Reinhard Heydrich, the number-two man in the SS and an architect of the Holocaust, was assassinated in Czechoslovakia in May 1942. Eulogized by Hitler himself as "The Man with the Iron Heart", Heydrich - also known as "The Butcher" and "The Hangman" - was one of the most ruthless and calculating of the Nazi elite.

In The Man with the Iron Heart, Heydrich survives that fated assassination attempt, only to hatch an insurgency as insidious as anything conceived by Osama bin Laden, designed to keep the German battlefront alive long after the supposed end to hostilities. The Allies thought the war was over, but their problems are just beginning.

The Man with the Iron Heart is the gripping story of the hunt for Rienhard Heydrisch and of the effort to suppress urban guerrilla warfare 60 years before we really run into it in Iraq. Powerful and compelling, Turtledove has never been better.

©2008 Harry Turtledove (P)2008 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Turtledove is the standard bearer for alternate history." (USA Today)
"Turtledove never tires of exploring the paths not taken, bringing to his storytelling a prodigious knowledge of his subject." (Library Journal)

Good read.

Narrator was odd in some voices, but overall a good job. I enjoyed this book. Great read!

Thought-provoking, but just not all there

The idea that Turtledove puts forth here of a Nazi insurrection after VE Day is a great one, and it makes you re-think many of the events in Iraq and Afghanistan...Can you feel that we should not be in Iraq when we should have been in Germany...and that is the book's strength. Its weakness is the writing, which just gets groaningly bad at times. I wish it were better, the book takes so long to get where it's going, but it just didn't make it. But I thought long and hard about the ideas here, long after I finished the book.

Fantastic

I am in love with this book. The story is so incredibly phenomenal; the characters are great and quite funny with the brutality of the situations their in.
I don’t want to give too much away with this book, but there is a part at the end that made me want to stop reading altogether, however once I read past that part, my god how I just adored this book even more. It took just the right twist that I wanted but full heartedly did not expect; it was perfect.

Overall if you’re looking for a book where the Nazis win or have a chance to win, this is the book you want. Definitely my favorite book of all time.

Very interesting like all of his Stories!

This makes you wonder " What If! " Yet like many of his stories he doesn't finish it. What happens after they hijack the planes, hit other countries with Terrorism attacks.

Great story, decent narrator

Loved the story but was irked throughout its entirety with how the narrator would swap between saying N K V D and nkvayday. Would entirely derail my enjoyment until I settled back into it

good story, very disappointing voice acting.

The narration is good, but the voice acting of german/russian accents is distractingly bad.

Iraq/Afghanistan Overlaid in post WWII Germany

I wanted to like this book more, as I I have read a lot of his other works and enjoyed them a lot. Really, I did. But unlike a lot of Turledove's books this one felt really heavy handed in the manner in which he overlaid post WW2 Germanywith contemporary events.

With the non-death of Reinhard Heydrich the Allies encounters a true opposition in post-defeat Germany. Heydrich has had 3 years to prepare for the downfall and subsequent resistance inside Germany. And to anyone who has followed the news in the past decade, every tool that Al Quada has deployed is in the arsenal of Heydrich's Werewolves. Suicide truck bombs, suicide bombers, IED's, other traps and even the kidnapping and execution of service members (caught on camera of course).

Maybe this book works for other people but I personally am exhausted from our own War against Terror that uses the same tactics, reading about them set into 1945-48 just felt like a chore.

Awesome book and narrator!

A spellbinding read! It kept me engaged from beginning to end. I thoroughly enjoyed this unique look at history.

I love Turttledove

I am so glad that Harry Turttledove is beginning to publish in audio and to Audible. Most of his works are simply masterful flights of the imagination into realms seldom so well tapped. This work is no different. Imagine Berlin and Baghdad mated together. The characters are so real...seldom can an author get me to empathize with them.

Not what I was expecting

Perhaps I was expecting more character build up of RH versus what the book delivered.

It is not even close to being about RH which really confuses me, considering the title! It is mostly poor prose and cheeky dialogue. RH may have 10% of the book. The rest is how the Americans are doing at finding him.

I would not spend the time or money. Sorry. In fact, I am asking for my $$ back.