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A review by lisa_setepenre
A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War by Hope Wolf, Sebastian Faulks
5.0
A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War is a collection of writings edited by Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf that focus on personal experiences of those who lived through – and endured – World War I.
The first thing to praise is the great wealth of material and differing viewpoints that Faulks and Wolf provide. A Broken World sources personal accounts from soldiers, pacifists, the women who were "left behind" and the refugees, and these from all sides of the war. The authors of the accounts are sometimes unknown, even anonymous, individuals, but more famous writers like Virginia Wolfe, Stuart Cloete, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are also represented. There is a mix of the more-mundane and the intensely emotional accounts.
Faulks and Wolf have divided A Broken World into four parts, taking this vast amount of material and dividing it into four separate categories. These categories try to address what it was like to hear of the war from far away, only able to imagine what it was really like, the experiences had at close quarters by the soldiers, how the war both divided and united nationalities and, finally, the sheer loss that resulted from the war that was supposed to end all wars.
This is not an easy read. It is staggeringly emotional, a book of an ugly beauty and a beautiful agony. It is a book to treasure, to learn about the war and how the war was experienced.
In his introduction, Sebastian Faulks sets out the vastness of the war and the great questions it asks of us, even today. It is a vastness that cannot be contained, compressed and represented in one book and the questions cannot be answered. But A Broken World does help us, a hundred years after the beginning of the war, to understand somewhat what happened and how its impact still rings through modern society.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley for review.
The first thing to praise is the great wealth of material and differing viewpoints that Faulks and Wolf provide. A Broken World sources personal accounts from soldiers, pacifists, the women who were "left behind" and the refugees, and these from all sides of the war. The authors of the accounts are sometimes unknown, even anonymous, individuals, but more famous writers like Virginia Wolfe, Stuart Cloete, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are also represented. There is a mix of the more-mundane and the intensely emotional accounts.
Faulks and Wolf have divided A Broken World into four parts, taking this vast amount of material and dividing it into four separate categories. These categories try to address what it was like to hear of the war from far away, only able to imagine what it was really like, the experiences had at close quarters by the soldiers, how the war both divided and united nationalities and, finally, the sheer loss that resulted from the war that was supposed to end all wars.
This is not an easy read. It is staggeringly emotional, a book of an ugly beauty and a beautiful agony. It is a book to treasure, to learn about the war and how the war was experienced.
In his introduction, Sebastian Faulks sets out the vastness of the war and the great questions it asks of us, even today. It is a vastness that cannot be contained, compressed and represented in one book and the questions cannot be answered. But A Broken World does help us, a hundred years after the beginning of the war, to understand somewhat what happened and how its impact still rings through modern society.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley for review.