The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

Peter Englund

Aug 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by David Stifel

About this audiobook

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe-a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund's collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.

About the author

Peter Englund is professor of history at Uppsala University. He has worked as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and the Balkans. He has recently been elected to the Swedish Academy, responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of the bestselling book The Battle that Shook Europe.

Actor David Stifel entered the audiobook narration field in 2011, when he launched a long-term podcast of serializations of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Today he is a multi-award-winning narrator with more than 125 titles to his credit.