The Beauty and the Sorrow; An Intimate History of the First World War

Englund, Peter, and Graves, Peter (Translator)

ISBN 10: 030759386X / ISBN 13: 9780307593863

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011

About this Item

xvi, 540, [2] pages. Chronology. Footnotes. 32 pages of Illustrations. To the Reader, Dramatis Personae, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, The End, Envoi, Sources and Literature. List of Illustrations. Index. Ink notation on fep. DJ is price clipped. DJ has minor wear and soiling. Peter Mikael Englund (born 4 April 1957) is a Swedish author and historian. Englund writes non-fiction books and essays, mainly about history. Especially about the Swedish Empire, but also about other historical events. He writes in a very accessible style, providing narrative details usually omitted in typical books about history. His books have gained popularity and are translated into several languages, such as German and Czech. He was the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy from 1 June 2009 to 31 May 2015, when he was succeeded by Sara Danius. Englund has received the August Prize (1993) and the Selma Lagerlöf Prize for Literature (2002). He was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 2002. On 1 June 2009, he succeeded Horace Engdahl as the permanent secretary of the Academy. On 6 April 2018, Englund announced that he would no longer participate in the Academy's work. On the same day, Klas Östergren and Kjell Espmark also declared that they would become inactive members of the Academy. In January 2019 Englund announced that he, and fellow academy member Espmark, would return as active members of the Swedish academy, where they had been inactive since April 2018. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Great War, as experienced by 20 ordinary people. There is no shortage of histories of World War I written from the viewpoints of the generals and statesmen who drove the grand strategies. Swedish historian Englund takes a different approach, creating a history of the war as perceived by 20 individuals scattered across the globe. Among them: an Australian woman driving ambulances for the Serbian army; a Venezuelan soldier of fortune in the Ottoman cavalry; the American wife of a Polish aristocrat, whose home was wrecked and then turned into a hospital for typhus victims by the occupying Germans; a French civil servant; a Scotsman fighting Germans in East Africa, a 12-year-old German girl, and a dozen others. The war began for them in an explosion of optimistic patriotism but descended inexorably into cynicism, horror, suffering, privation and exhaustion. Through it all they endured, trying to make sense of it and bear up with their dignity and humanity intact. There are adventures and battles, of course, but also many moments of quiet contemplation with closely observed details of street scenes, restaurants, railway stations and deserted battlefields. Englund unobtrusively includes helpful background information within the text or in footnotes. The text is based largely on diaries, letters and memoirs, from which the author quotes copiously, but most of the narrative is his own, an artful condensation of his source materials into brief passages faithful to the experiences and emotional states of his subjects. Largely written in the present tense to maintain the sense of immediacy, it is by turns pithy, lyrical, colorful, poignant and endlessly absorbing. An exquisite book.

Seller Inventory # 81970

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Beauty and the Sorrow; An Intimate History of the First World War
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030759386X
• ISBN 13: 9780307593863
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Third printing [stated].
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very good

About this title

Synopsis

In this masterly, highly original narrative history, Peter Englund takes a revelatory new approach to the history of World War I, magnifying its least examined, most stirring component: the experiences of the average man and woman—not only the tragedy and horror but also the absurdity and even, at times, the beauty.

The twenty people from whose journals and letters Englund draws are from Belgium, Denmark, and France; Great Britain, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Italy, Australia, and New Zealand; Russia, Venezuela, and the United States. There is a young man in the British army infantry who had been considering emigrating until the war offered him its “grand promise of change” and a middle-aged French civil servant, a socialist and writer whose “faith simply crumbled” at the outbreak of war. There is a twelve-year-old German girl thrilled with the news of the army’s victories because it means that she and her classmates are allowed to shout and scream at school. There is an American woman married to a Polish aristocrat, living a life of quiet luxury when the war begins but who will be moved, ultimately, to declare: Looking Death in the eyes, one loses the fear of Him. From field surgeon to nurse to fighter pilot, some are on the Western Front, others in the Balkans, East Africa, Mesopotamia. Two will die, one will never hear a shot fired; some will become prisoners of war, others will be celebrated as heroes. But despite their various war-time occupations and fates, genders and nationalities, they will be united by their involvement—witting or otherwise—in The Great, and terrible, War.

A brilliant mosaic of perspectives that moves between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and the Sorrow reconstructs the feelings, impressions, experiences, and shifting spirits of these twenty particular people, allowing them to speak not only for themselves but also for all those who were in some way shaped by the war, but whose voices have been forgotten, rejected, or simply remained unheard.

About the Author

Peter Englund is a Swedish historian, who has received numerous prizes in his own country and whose works have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also been working as a war correspondent in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Englund is a member of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature), and in 2008 was appointed its new permanent secretary, an office he still holds.