Side Trails & Book Review

Up to now this blog has been exclusively about my own book but there's only so much I can say without being repetitious. That's why I'm blogging my trail journal. It offers something a bit different, although closely related. Somewhat of a side trail.


A definite side trail will be capsule book reviews. Not necessarily related to the AT or hiking. Just because I read and can write about it. So here's the first one.

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War, Peter Englund (2011)

Non-fiction. War doesn’t get any more intimate than as seen in Peter Englund’s history of First World War. Englund makes no attempt to understand the war’s causes or significance. Instead he follows lives from August 1914 to November 1918. The dramatis personae are officer and enlisted, reluctant conscript and enthusiastic patriot, cynic and idealist. There’s even a Venezuelan cavalryman and a 12 year old German girl. Only two Americans are part of the story, the American wife of a Polish nobleman and an Army field surgeon, a reminder of how limited was American involvement. All kept war time diaries which Englund mines for the daily detail of a war that spanned France, Belgium, Germany, the Balkans, Middle East and Africa. This detail is combined with extensive research on the war’s social and economic impact, military operations, weapons and tactics to give the reader a granular account of an event that of far eclipses its many individuals. It is this detail that allows a reader to experience that war as an individual. At that level, the story is timeless. The words of 1914-1918 echo those of many previous wars and the Great War’s many successors.