The Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin
The Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin
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The Last of the Doughboys
The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

Author: Richard Rubin

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Unabridged: 20 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/21/2013


Synopsis

In 2003, eighty-five 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 found dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interviewed them. All are gone now. A decade-long odyssey to recover the story of a forgotten generation and their war led Rubin across the United States and France, through archives, private collections, 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 airplane; an eighteen-year-old Bronx girl drafted to work for the War Department; a machine gunner from Montana; a marine wounded at Belleau Wood; the sixteen-year-old who became Americas last World War I veteran; and 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 war they wonthe trauma that created our modern worldmight at last be remembered. You will never forget them.The Last of the Doughboysis more than simply a war story; it is a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and memory.

About Richard Rubin

RICHARD RUBIN (M.A.) was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University and began his career as a small town journalist in Greenwood, Mississippi. Since then he has written for rather larger outlets, routinely contributing to: The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker and AARP Magazine. He is the author of the books: Confederacy of Silence, and The Last of the Doughboys. He lives in Maine.


Reviews

Goodreads review by KOMET on March 19, 2017

A few minutes ago (it's now 9:29 PM EST as I write this), I finished reading this book. I felt both grateful for the considerable work the author put into travelling across the country (starting in the summer of 2003) to interview personally as many of the surviving U.S. veterans (men and women alik......more

This is a review of the 20 hour CD set, The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin. Because this is an oral history and because narrator Grover Gardner does such an exceptional job this unedited version has more life and more humanity than reading the words. Author Richard Rubin injects a little too......more

Goodreads review by Philip on August 21, 2016

Brilliant concept and almost flawless execution. I know I said in an earlier review of Winston Groom’s A Storm in Flanders that it feels wrong to say I actually “enjoyed” a book about such a horrific period of history, but Last of the Doughboys was just a solid pleasure from it’s amazing first sente......more

Goodreads review by Leanda on January 31, 2014

This was part of my reading as a judge for the Guggenheim-Lehrman Military History Prize - and one of my favourites. Oral histories can be pretty weak, but this one is original, moving, and witty. Rubin interviews the last living Americans to have served in WWI - all well over a hundred years old. T......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on May 24, 2017

Richard Rubin's The Last of the Doughboys is a work of journalism than a history book, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Rubin interviewed the last surviving World War I veterans in the 2000s and combined that with a broad, conversational overview of the war and American culture in the early 20th......more