The Beauty and the Sorrow

Starred review from August 29, 2011
In a brilliant feat of retrospective journalism, leading Swedish historian Englund allows 20 individuals during WWI to convey their experiences through diaries and letters: among them, an English nurse in the Russian army, a British infantryman awarded the Victoria Cross, a German seaman, and a Venezuelan cavalryman in the Ottoman army. Englund’s deft collation provides insights into more than the carnage; for example, a French infantryman at Verdun knows, despite lower figures in newspaper reports, that he went into battle with 100 men and only 30 returned. Lacking only a Turkish Muslim view, this book fleshes out the grim statistics of the Great War. Writing in the present tense as though immersed in the events, Englund describes typhus and malnutrition, the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, French troops’ mutinies, erosion of European colonialism in Africa, and governments’ suppression of the extent of their armies’ losses. The eloquence of everyday participants—a German schoolgirl describes the war as “a ghost in grey rags, a skull with maggots crawling out of it”—will link the reader to the era when the origins of the ensuing century’s conflicts became apparent. 32 pages of photos.

Starred review from October 15, 2011
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 (The Battle that Shook Europe: Poltova and the Birth of the Russian Empire, 2002, etc.) 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.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2011

Englund (The Battle That Shook Europe), a Swedish historian, gives us an intimate "anti-history" generated from the feelings, experiences, and moods of 20 men and women of widely ranging nationalities, ages, and wartime occupations, selected from available published primary sources. The narrative reads chronologically, often paraphrasing the individuals' words, but with actual quotations as well. The effect is riveting, as the entries--contrived from letters, diaries, and memoirs--offer glimpses into the daily lives of schoolchildren, mothers, nurses, infantrymen, pilots, and civilians as they subjectively process events across the whole theater of war and survival. VERDICT 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.--Ben Malczewski, Ypsilanti Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2011
Swedish historian and war correspondent Englund, an official of the committee that bestows the Nobel Prize in Literature, offers views of WWI through 20 people who experienced it. That approach purposely negates narrative coherence in favor of the episodic impressions Englund gathered from his subjects' letters, diaries, and, if they survived to write any, postwar memoirs. Predominantly paraphrasing this material, Englund extensively footnotes it with information about the larger matter (a battle, a type of weapon, a peace proposal) only dimly perceived by the individuals he tracks through four years of war. They represent categories of soldier, sailor, airman, nurse, doctor, driver, bureaucrat, and civilian who undergo war's characteristic emotions of excitement and boredom, fortitude and fear. What haunts this work is WWI's signature of colossal casualties. As Englund's characters confront the dead and wounded in anatomical detail, their initial enthusiasm for the war attenuates until the conflict, from their necessarily personal perspectives, simply ends. A treatment that deepens readers' appreciation for the human dimension, Englund's effort emotively supplements conventional histories of WWI.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)