

A Soldier of the Great War
Author: Mark Helprin
Narrator: David Colacci
Unabridged: 31 hr 3 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 10/16/2007
Categories: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Author: Mark Helprin
Narrator: David Colacci
Unabridged: 31 hr 3 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 10/16/2007
Categories: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Mark Helprin is the internationally acclaimed author of numerous works, including the New York Times bestsellers Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Swan Lake.
David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, performing coast-to-coast in lead roles of plays by a variety of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sam Shepard to Steve Martin. He has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years, during which time he has read the works of such authors as Jules Verne, Henry Adams, John Irving, Michael Chabon, and John Lescroart. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. David was a resident actor/director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992. He currently lives in New York with his wife, narrator and actress Susan Ericksen, and his children, Mario and Elena.
I'd probably argue that Mark Helprin's greatest asset can also be his greatest flaw. This is his mental exuberance. This book doesn't need to be 790 pages long. It's often his philosophical digressions, somewhat repetitive in nature, that I'd have been much more ruthless in weeding out. It's perhaps......more
When we first meet Alessandro, the soldier from the title, he’s an elderly but still vital man who takes a principled stand against a streetcar driver who refused to stop for a would-be rider giving chase. Alessandro ends up getting off as a kind of protest and faces a distant journey on foot with t......more
A friend recommended this epic book to me despite knowing I wasn't fond of Helprin's novels. Well, he certainly perceived my taste fittingly, and I am forever indebted to him for persuading me to read this beautiful, evocative, deeply resonating story of a soldier-scholar living through WW I. This is......more
“Extraordinary…A vast, ambitious, spiritually lusty, all-guzzling, all-encompassing novel.”
New York Times Book Review“A rousing tale…riotous energy and sustained brilliance…Helprin lights his own way, in his own singular direction.”
Time“Intense, memorable…magnificent…A massive, soaring novel of ideas and ordeals.”
Entertainment Weekly“Energetic prose, poetic images of great intensity, and an antic imagination combine in this gripping moral fable narrated by a septuagenarian irrevocably altered by World War I.”
Publishers Weekly“The language is rich without cloying, complex yet luminous in Helprin’s best style. In a number of thoughtful philosophical passages as engaging as any adventure story, Alesandro struggles to reconcile his appreciation of beauty and his religious faith with the horror around him. That he finally persuades us to believe in a ‘God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror’ is testimony to the indomitable human spirit. Highly recommended.”
Library Journal“[An] ebullient, elegiac novel of destruction and survival…Tender, optimistic, and sumptuously presented: a feast of a novel, right down to Alessandro’s tender lingering over the final course.”
Kirkus Reviews