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The Unwomanly Face of War cover art

The Unwomanly Face of War

Written by: Svetlana Alexievich, Richard Pevear - translator, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator
Narrated by: Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson
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Publisher's Summary

A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“A landmark.” (Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)

For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions...a history of the soul.”

In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women - more than a million in total - were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.

Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war - the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories.

Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the 20th century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war.

“But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown...I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.” (Svetlana Alexievich)

Read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, and Alan Winter 

THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
“[F]or her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

“A mighty documentarian and a mighty artist... Her books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies.” (The New Yorker)

©2017 Svetlana Alexievich (P)2017 Random House Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

What the critics say

"Alexievich's artistry has raised oral history to a totally different dimension. It is no wonder that her brilliant obsession with what Vasily Grossman called 'the brutal truth of war' was suppressed for so long by Soviet censors, because her unprecedented pen portraits and interviews reveal the face of war hidden by propaganda." (Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege)
"Whatever you thought you knew about the war, you should put it aside and listen to the voices here." ( Library Journal)

What listeners say about The Unwomanly Face of War

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Great Listen

Great depiction of an often overlooked experience. This was an incredibly well written account

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Excellent

As an oral history, this book is best listened to -- the narrators were absolutely perfect. Highly recommend this deeply moving book.

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incredible

as a history buff who has read and watched everything on ww2 since I was a kid this blew my mind the women's perspective is so incredibly different then anything I've seen or read before if you really want to get a sense of what it was like in the war please listen to this it's a real eye opener and I can't recommend it enough.

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I listened to this a year ago and still share it

What a powerful and captivating book. Living in Canada we have yet to experience what most of the other continents have in the last century or presently.
After listening a year ago I still find myself sharing this work often.

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