Review: THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW by Peter Englund

Tutu’s Two Cents recently read and reviewed The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund for the WWI Reading Challenge in 2012.  Here’s an excerpt:

This is not a book to be enjoyed in the sense of bringing pleasure or smiles to the reader, but it is a book to be savored and remembered and celebrated.  In this work, the author gives us the Great War, not as a series of battles, blunders, and victories, not as the bloviations of politicians, kings, tsars, potentates and generals, not as compilations of maps, charts, statistics, and bureaucratic mumblings; rather he gives us the people who fought, lived and died this war.

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Review: THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Peter Englund, translated by Peter Graves

Diary of an Eccentric recently read and reviewed The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, translated by Peter Graves for the WWI Reading Challenge in 2012.  Here’s a snippet:

Its structure also makes it difficult to follow.  Rather than tell the story of each person separately, Englund divides the book into sections, one for each year from 1914 to 1918, and assembles their diaries, journals, and letters chronologically so that there is a constant shift from one individual to another.  If there hadn’t been a list of the individuals at the beginning of the book, I would have been completely lost; I was constantly flipping back and forth to keep track.

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**Attention participants: Remember to email us a link to your reviews, and we’ll post them here so we can see what everyone is reading!**