Book Summary and Reviews of Unknown Soldiers by Neil Hanson

Unknown Soldiers by Neil Hanson

Unknown Soldiers

The Story of the Missing of the First World War

by Neil Hanson

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  • Published:
  • May 2006, 496 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The First World War was a conflict of unprecedented ferocity that unleashed such demons as mechanized warfare and mass death on the twentieth century. After the last shot was fired and the troops marched home, approximately three million soldiers remained unaccounted for. Some bodies were found, but they bore no trace of identification; many more men had been blown to smithereens or had simply vanished in battlefields where as many as a hundred shells had fallen on every square yard.

In Unknown Soldiers, Hanson once again offers an unflinching yet compassionate account of the reality of battle on the front lines. He focuses on three soldiers - an American, an Englishman, and a German - and narrates their war experiences through their diaries and letters.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Vivid, sobering and without macho swagger or sentimentality, Hanson lets the voices of the unknowns speak across a bloody century with lessons for the new one." - PW.

This information about Unknown Soldiers was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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