Lest We Forget. . .

Today I'm going to start reading The Beauty and The Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, translated by Peter Graves.  It's the history of twenty ordinary people during the war but with a real international perspective that I think will be illuminating, thought-provoking and unlike any other history of the war that I have read. Dwight Garner has a review  here in the New York Times in which he notes that the book, "has the most devastating ending I can remember in a piece of nonfiction".