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Published Nov 2011
560 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
A highly original and revelatory narrative history of World War I that brings into focus its least examined, most stirring component: the experience of the average man or woman.
To create this intimate picture of what war was really like, Peter Englund draws from the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals. They hail from Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and Venezuela. Some fight on the Western Front, others in the Alps or Mesopotamia; some never see a battlefield. There is a twelve-year-old German schoolgirl, an English nurse in the Russian army, a French civil servant, an American woman married to a Polish aristocrat - all of whom will be united by their involvement, witting or otherwise, in The Great, and terrible, War.
A brilliant mosaic of perspectives, the narrative reads with a depth of feeling and an evocation of time and place we might expect of a novel, and allows these twenty men and women to speak for not only themselves, but also for all of those who were in some way shaped by the war, yet whose voices remain unheard.
"Starred Review. [A] brilliant feat of retrospective journalism..." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. 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." - Kirkus Reviews
"Englund adds a rich representation of voice and an opportunity for empathy not found in most studies of World War I. Although the stories seem stacked too dramatically, this is still a rewarding read." - Library Journal
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Englund is a Swedish historian who has received numerous prizes in his own country and whose works have been translated into fourteen languages. He has also been working as a war correspondent. 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.
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