The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War - Rilegato

Rubin, Richard

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0547554435 ISBN 13: 9780547554433

Casa editrice: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

Riassunto

In 2003, 85 years after the armistice, it took Richard Rubin months to find just one living American veteran of World War I. But then, he found another. And another. Eventually he managed to find dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interview them. All are gone now.

A decade-long odyssey to recover the story of a forgotten generation and their Great War led Rubin across the United States and France, through archives, private collections, and battlefields, literature, propaganda, and even music. But at the center of it all were the last of the last, the men and women he met: a new immigrant, drafted and sent to France, whose life was saved by a horse; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought in every major American battle; a Cajun artilleryman nearly killed by a German aeroplane; an 18-year-old Bronx girl “drafted” to work for the War Department; a machine-gunner from Montana; a Marine wounded at Belleau Wood; the 16-year-old who became America’s last WWI veteran; and many, many more.

They were the final survivors of the millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces, nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they kept their stories to themselves for a lifetime, then shared them at the last possible moment, so that they, and the World War they won – the trauma that created our modern world – might at last be remembered. You will never forget them.The Last of the Doughboys is more than simply a war story: It is a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and memory.

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Recensione:

Praise for CONFEDERACY OF SILENCE: "[Rubin's] willingness to look honestly at the complexity of race in today's South is invigorating, and the book's conclusion . . . is shattering."— The New Yorker "A page-turner . . . Rubin seems to have gone to school on the fine writers in whom Mississippi abounds, [including] Eudora Welty and Willie Morris."
— The Washington Post "In Confederacy of Silence, Richard Rubin takes a haunting journey through the new and not-so-new South. Part coming-of-age saga, part detective story, part football journal, Rubin's compelling book is at its heart an examination of the never-ending agonies of race."— Jeffrey Toobin "Richard Rubin is a skillful observer -- wryly honest about his own naïveté; discerning in his depiction of social dynamics in the 'New Old South'; and grateful for his fish-out-of-water status and the freedom it gives him. With relentless curiosity and sometimes grim humor, Confederacy of Silence paints a portrait of an emblematic place at a pivotal time."— Cullen Murphy

Product Description:

Book by Rubin Richard

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0547554435
• ISBN 13: 9780547554433
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 518