title: The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War
author:  Peter Englund 
description: Intense and bighearted . . . The best books about World War I have often been oblique, like Paul Fussells <i>Great War and Modern Memory, </i>or novels, like Erich Maria Remarques <i>All Quiet on the Western Front, </i>rather than comprehensive histories. Englunds volume joins an unconventional pantheon . . . The accounts of [these] lives can be terrifying or stirring, but are most fully alive in Englunds accumulation of small moments, stray details . . . His book has the most devastating ending I can remember in a piece of nonfiction.<br /><b><i>The New York Times</i></b><br /><br />A wonderfully wide andrich mosaic of personal experience from the First World War.<br /><b>Antony Beevor, author of <i>Stalingrad </i>and <i>D-Day: The Battle for Normandy</i></b><br /><br />Powerful and compelling . . . Of the many books about the First World War this is among the most strikingly original . . . Almost every page of Englunds book is fresh and revelatory.<br /><b><i>Daily Express </i>(UK)</b><br /><b><i></i></b><br />Englund covers a lot of ground in <i>The Beauty and the Sorrow, </i>geographically, topically, and in point of view . . . Englund succeeds in his goal to humanize the war.<br /><b><i>Dallas Morning News</i></b><br /><br />Englund frees individual experience from the collective cloak of history and geography [in] this extraordinary book . . . The details build like a symphony.<br /><b><i>Mail on Sunday </i>(UK)<br /></b><br />They call them the lost generation, but youll find their story here.<br /><b><i>New York Post<br /></i></b><br />A brilliant feat of retrospective journalism . . . Englunds deft collation provides insights into more than the carnage . . . This book fleshes out the grim statistics of the Great War . . . The eloquence of everyday participants will link the reader to the era when the origins of the ensuing centurys conflicts became apparent.<br /><b><i>Publishers Weekly </i>(starred)<br /></b><br />An exquisite book . . . 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 . . . By turns pithy, lyrical, colorful, poignant, and endlessly absorbing.<br /><b><i>Kirkus Reviews </i>(starred)<br /></b><br />[There are] hundreds of eerie, moving, upsetting, and surprising incidents from the First World War within this extraordinary book . . . Like a great novel, <i>The Beauty and the Sorrow </i>manages to be both more universal and more particular [than other books on WWI]. Peter Englund frees individual experience from the collective cloak of history and geography . . . The details build like a symphony . . . Englund writes with a calm clarity, beautifully conveyed by his translator.<br /><b><i>Mail on Sunday </i>(5 stars, UK)</b><br /><br />Anthologies of war reminiscences are often lazy stuff, mere compilations of extracted passages from diaries and letters . . . [But] Englunds choice of witnesses and his use of their material are admirably judged. This is an anthology well above the common run . . . This is a book about men and women living at the outer edge of human experience.<br /><b>Max Hastings, <i>Sunday Times </i>(UK)</b><br /><br />Peter Englund is one of the finest writers of our time on the tactics, the killing and the psychology of war. In <i>The Beauty and the Sorrow</i> he superbly and humanely brings to life all the tragedy, chaos, death and gunsmoke of battle.<br /><b>Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of <i>Stalin </i>and <i>Young Stalin</i></b><br /><br />The book is a masterpiece . . . as entertaining as [it is] thrilling. Peter Englund has truly outdone himself.<br /><b><i>Svenska Dagbladet</i> (Sweden)<br /></b><br />Magisterial . . . The Great War from the inside. As vivid as real life. Never has there been such an up-close, intimate and at the same time harrowing encounter with the military aspects of this war. No one has ever told World War I like Peter Englund tells it.<br /><b><i>El Pas </i>(Spain)</b><br /><br />A magnificent book: you can feel their breathing on your skin. So near, so overwhelming.<br /><b>Geert Mak, author of <i>In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century</i></b><br /><br /><i>The Beauty and Sorrow</i> has given me the most intense reading experience [Ive had] in a very long time. Englund is a genius in portraying scenes, in which his actors perform with great intensity, in an often poetic way.<br /><b><i>Dagens Nyheter </i>(Sweden)</b> <br /><br />Englunds work is exquisite. As a historian, his skill is astonishing. But the prosespare, painstakingly detailed and intimateis the work of another Englund, of an extremely powerful storyteller.<br /><b><i>Qu Leer </i>(Spain)</b><br /><br />Until now I had only read two books on the First World War that I found absolutely essential. The first is Erich Maria Remarques <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i>. The second is <i>The Guns of August</i> by Barbara Tuchman, an intelligent work by an accomplished historian. <i>The Beauty and the Sorrow</i> is a good complement to these two.<br /><b><i>La Vanguardia, Culturas </i>(Spain)</b><br /><b></b><br /><br /><br />
zlib_text: THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
  
  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
  
  Translation copyright © 2011 by Peter Graves All rights reserved. Published in
  the United States by  
  Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,  
  and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.  
  [www.aaknopf.com](http://www.aaknopf.com)
  
  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered  
  trademarks of Random House, Inc.
  
  Originally published in slightly different form in Sweden as _Stridens Skönhet
  Och Sorg_ by Atlantis, Stockholm, in 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Peter Englund.  
  Copyright © 2009 by Bokförlaget Atlantis AB. This translation, with a revised
  foreword and additional new text by the author, was originally published in
  Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd., London, in 2011.
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Englund, Peter, 1957–
  [Stridens skönhet och sorg. English]  
  The beauty and the sorrow : an intimate history of the First World War / by
  Peter Englund. —1st. American ed. 