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

Richard Rubin's The Last of the Doughboys is easily one of the best books - fiction or non-fiction - that I have read in a very long time. Last year I read, and liked, The Long Way Home (David Laskin), which tells the stories of a dozen European-American immigrants who return to the old country as soldiers in Uncle Sam's army. That book makes a perfect companion to The Last of the Doughboys, not least because the latter actually includes first-hand account from two of the immigrant soldiers in that book: Samuel Goldberg and Anthony Pierro. (Which means that not only did those two survive the war, but survived it by longer than all but a handful of their fellow veterans - in the U.S. or anywhere else.)

Rubin and Laskin obviously differ in the scope of their work. Laskin set out to describe the immigrant experience while Rubin, in telling stories of what centenarians and super-centenarians remain from that war, by necessity also explores not only explores the American experience in war, but America's experience at war. Rubin has done an incredible about of research on everything from Tin Pan Alley to Alien and Sedition Acts and the veteran experience, particularly in the throes of the Great Depression. He has also spent considerable time walking the battlefields and villages of France, visiting the tiny museums chock full of old canteens and buttons, taken the time to study the layout and maintenance of the many cemeteries that still bear witness to the War to End All Wars.

It helps that those who have lived for 100-plus years have lived, to a man (or woman, in a couple of cases), full and fascinating lives. The family of one lived on what Rubin posits may have been the only integrated street in New Orleans - or the South for that matter - and was neighbors with Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame. Others were among the first to open "Indian Country," better known as Oklahoma, or to see  a "flying machine" in action.

The stories, not surprisingly, speak for themselves and yet, what Rubin adds to the recollections is simply done so well that his interjections and asides are part of what makes the book so great - as with his comments when a 107-year-old woman asks him if he remembers the "old coal wagons, you know, the ones driven by a horse."

If you read nothing else about World War in the U.S. - or even the later battles on the Western Front, period - read The Last of the Doughboys. Rubin's book is just that good.