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The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund
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The Beauty and the Sorrow

An Intimate History of the First World War

$31.49

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Narrator David Stifel

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Translator Peter Graves
Length 21 hours 32 minutes
Language English
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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.

Peter Englund is professor of history at Uppsala University, Sweden's oldest and most prestigious seat of learning. He is heavily involved in the international media and 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. His bestselling The Battle that Shook Europe is recognized as the definitive work on the subject, and an international classic of the genre.

David Stifel was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. Bitten early by the acting bug, he studied his craft at the Yale School of Drama. After graduation, he found himself in the usual array of interesting day jobs such as casino porter at Lake Tahoe, ESL teacher in Iran, and Egypt, and video game programmer in the Atari/Intellivision era. Concurrently he worked in films and TV shows for such directors as Steven Spielberg (Minority Report), Danny Boyle (A Life Less Ordinary), and Joel Schumacher (The Number 23). David entered the audiobook 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 audiobooks to his credit. His growing catalog of audiobooks is strong on thrillers, horror, sci-fi, and mysteries. David's rich baritone voice also lends itself very well to nonfiction memoirs and history-popular and academic. His classical acting training makes him very strong with heightened literary language. Pegged as a "character actor" from youth, his facility with numerous characters is frequently praised by reviewers and listeners.

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