The Missing of the Somme

A deeply personal meditation on remembrance, art, and World War I by the legendary Geoff Dyer, reissued with a new introduction by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance--and completely, unabashedly unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, Geoff Dyer examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose, determined--sometimes in advance of the events described--the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War. Reissued with a new introduction, The Missing of the Somme stands as one of Dyer’s classic works.

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including The Last Days of Roger Federer, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Zona, See/Saw, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.