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scgirl730's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.25
dianapn2015's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
5.0
For sure one of the best books I've ever read. Heart-wrenching, thought provoking, enlightening. The mission to portray the First World War from an emotional rather than factual perspective was accomplished.
leslielu67's review against another edition
5.0
This was an awesome book. The author chronicled 20 participants in WW One through their journal entries. The people included soldiers, both high rank and low, as well as civilians, surgeons, nurses and ambulance drivers, and the theaters ranged from the trenches to submarines to Turkey and Africa. The journal entries were chronological, and Englund describes the events and troop movements that are relevant to the entry and the participant; the result is a very readable account of the war from this wide range of participants. More than one describe the excitement and adventure of going off to war, then the realization that it has become a slaughter with an energy and momentum that is unstoppable.
aaronreadabook's review against another edition
4.0
The Beauty and the Sorrow is a history of the First World War told from the perspectives of 20 ordinary people who took part. This is an interesting perspective as people didn't really know what was going on and were trying to understand a world gone insane. A very different type of history book covering a war where people were basically cannon fodder.
hamidah's review against another edition
3.5
englund is masterful in weaving the tales of the “characters” he studies together and he is intentional in every choice he makes along the way. i like that he touches on the Armenian genocide and Palestine in the war (though only briefly), but i wish he included more about colonies’ role in the war. for example, the majority of the British army was Indian, but only one Indian soldier is mentioned (and only in passing). this book would have told a larger and more whole truth if there was at least one perspective from the colonized. the focus is primarily on thoughts and feelings rather than historical facts and statistics, but those themes would only be enhanced by the colonized man’s feelings of mistreatment within the army and his pondering of why he has been made to fight a war that he has absolutely nothing to do with (even more so than the white soldier). i have read documents like this from Indian soldiers so I am most certain they exist. this missing narrative makes the work feel incomplete to me. i understand that primary documents in languages farther removed from english than say, italian, may have been harder to find and translate for englund, but such an inclusion would have been so worth it.
ariannefowler's review against another edition
4.25
I thought this was a very well crafted mosaic of narratives. These are the voices of the everyday man and woman. Englund beautifully captured the vast range of emotions from 1914-1918. I appreciated the broad scope of narratives and how it all came together to tell the story of people and places in history.
emdowd's review against another edition
5.0
I have a lot of feelings about World War One. This is the book I've been wanting for years: Personal accounts that highlight just how many different people (of all nationalities, ethnicities, occupations, ages, genders etc.) experienced these four years in so many different ways. Researched like a textbook, but reads like a novel. Also, I had a guy attempt to flirt with me on the Metro because I was reading this ("That's not the kind of thing you usually see somebody reading on the Metro. How is it?"), so there's that.