Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Lines - Softcover

Author TBD

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0792242041 ISBN 13: 9780792242048

Publisher: National Geographic, 2005

Synopsis

The experience of war has affected every generation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and every soldier has a story to tell. Since the year 2000, the Veteran's History Project, a new permanent department of the Library of Congress, has been collecting and preserving the memories of veterans. In addition to more than 50,000 recorded oral histories, the Veteran's History Project has amassed thousands of letters, photographs, scrapbooks, and invaluable mementos from nearly a century of warfare.

In the first book to showcase the richness and depth of this collection, Voices of War tells a compelling, emotional, history of the experience of war, weaving together veterans' stories from in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The stories are organized thematically into sections-from signing up to coming home, generations of veterans recall individual experiences that together tell the extraordinary story of America at war. Letters, photographs, sketches and paintings enrich the compelling oral history.

Voices of War is sure to provoke memories and reflection and truly honor the sacrifices made by millions of veterans who have fought to defend our freedom.

Introduction by former Senator Max Cleland and an Afterword by Senator Chuck Hagel, both of whom are Vietnam veterans.

About this title

About the Author:

The Library of Congress, located in Washington, D.C., is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution. The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.

From Publishers Weekly:

Chosen from among the more than 30,000 oral histories collected by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, these first-person impressions of some 60 men and women who took part in the U.S.'s most salient 20th-century conflicts—WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm—come together to form a meaningful narrative. The object, editor Weiner notes, was "not to cover every engagement in each war, but rather to offer an impressionistic and intensely felt portrait of the ground-level soldier, slogging through the mud of France, the jungles of the Pacific, or the desert of Kuwait," and many other places in between. The book contains scores of brief entries organized by topic ("Under Fire"; "Coming Home") and war, enhanced by 175 color photos. Sometimes the flow constricts as narrators shift from doughboys in European trenches to Kevlar-helmeted infantrymen in the Kuwaiti desert, but the editors have chosen their testifiers well. As with any oral history, what we get are personal reflections, not historical syntheses. And with a foreword by Rep. Ron Kind, an introduction by former Sen. Max Cleland and an afterword by Sen. Chuck Hagel, there is plenty of veteran elected representation here, too.
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About this edition

• Publisher: National Geographic
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0792242041
• ISBN 13: 9780792242048
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320