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The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War

The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great WarAuthor: James Carl Nelson
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book

List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $7.91
as of 3/16/2010 16:58 CDT details
You Save: $18.08 (70%)



New (33) Used (19) from $7.91

Seller: horizonbb
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars 22 reviews
Sales Rank: 52342

Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4

ISBN: 0312551002
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.41273092
EAN: 9780312551001
ASIN: 0312551002

Publication Date: October 13, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Features:
  • ISBN13: 9780312551001
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Also Available In:

  • Paperback - The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War
  • Audio Cassette - The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War (Library Edition)
  • Audio Download - The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War (Unabridged)
  • MP3 CD - The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War
  • Unknown Binding - The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War (Playaway Adult Nonfiction)
  • Audio CD - The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War (Library Edition)

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

“Not since Flags of Our Fathers—no, make that, Not since Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory—no, make that, Not ever—has an American nonfiction writer reached into history and produced a testament of young men in terrible battle with the stateliness, the mastery of cadence, the truthfulness and the muted heartbreak of James Carl Nelson in The Remains of Company D. I wish I’d had the honor of working on this book with him. But then, he didn’t need me.”---Ron Powers, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers and author of Mark Twain: A Life

“A beautifully crafted anthem to doomed American youth, James Carl Nelson’s The Remains of Company D is a must-read for World War I enthusiasts and those looking for a damn good war book.”---Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of The Longest Winter and The Bedford Boys

“War is always hell, but the unprecedented carnage on World War I’s Western Front was the stuff of nightmares. The American boys of Company D were on the front lines, and James Carl Nelson has combined previously unpublished first-person accounts, prodigious research, and vivid, you-are-there prose into one of the great books on the subject. This is a Band of Brothers for World War I.”---James Donovan, author of A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—the Last Great Battle of the American West

“James Carl Nelson’s book is a great contribution to AEF history. He has done an incredible amount of research in order to convey the experience of one group of doughboys...and to tell their story through their own words.….He reminds us that these long-forgotten battles of ninety years ago were as hard fought as any before or since, and that our country was well served by the young men who fought them. Get this book. It puts a very human face on the experience of Americans on the Western Front.”---Dr. Paul Herbert, executive director of the Cantigny First Division Foundation

Haunted by an ancestor’s tale of near death on a distant battlefield, James Carl Nelson set out in pursuit of the scraps of memory of his grandfather’s small infantry unit. Years of travel across the world led to the retrieval of unpublished personal papers, obscure memoirs, and communications from numerous Doughboys as well as original interviews of the descendents of his grandfather’s comrades in arms. The result is a compelling tale of battle rooted in new primary sources, and one man’s search for his grandfather’s legacy in a horrifying maelstrom that is today poorly understood and nearly forgotten.

The Remains of Company D follows the members of Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, United States First Division, from enlistment to combat to the effort to recover their remains, focusing on the three major battles at Cantigny, Soissons, and in the Meuse-Argonne and the effect these horrific battles had on the men.

This is an important and powerful tale of the different destinies, personalities, and motivations of the men in Company D and a timeless portrayal of men at war.




Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22



5 out of 5 stars A Story of the Great War   March 11, 2010
J. Rudolph (Fort Worth, TX)
Iam a 65 year old retired teacher of 30 years and have been married to my retired soldier/high school/ university sweetheart for almost 44 years. I am an avid reader and the majority of the books in our house are military non-fiction. THE REMAINS OF COMPANY D is thus far the best book that I have read about that horrible war that ushered in the 20th century and introduced so many horrible weapons against man. The author has a stake in the book as his grandfather should have been killed crossing a road to Paris but was, instead, alive at 101. James C. Nelson used his grandfather as a stepping off point to begin searching for other Americans who had given their lives with Company D. This book is one of those that I am reading slowly in order to absorb names, places, etc if that horrible time in our history. His descriptions are so very vivid, you can smell the death and see the bloated corpses. I highly recommend this book.


5 out of 5 stars The Remains of Company D   February 19, 2010
S. Robbins (Palm Springs, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I loved this book. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let me tell you why. I am a great fan of military history and have been reading books on battles, wars and combatants for more years than I care to remember. For a long time I stuck with the tried and true, Civil War and WWII. When I saw The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War, I was excited, I'm finally expanding my interests to other eras. I was not disappointed with this book. It tells the story of a company of US solders, from their recruitment to the lives they lived after the war. So many books don't give you the human element and Remains does this better than any other book I've read. Another aspect of the book that I found so interesting was the detail about the life of the doughboy at the front. I still can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like to go "over the top" and run towards the enemy trenches. The sacrifices that were made are almost incomprehensible and we certainly owe more gratitude than we can express to our veterans of the Great War and all the other wars our country has been involved with from the founding of our country to today.

If you like military history, I can't recommend this book enough.



3 out of 5 stars more journalism than history   January 26, 2010
Yalensian
3 out of 5 found this review helpful

Written with flair and heavy on human-interest-type stories, THE REMAINS OF COMPANY D is an entertaining read but less valuable as a work of history. Nelson begins with his grandfather, who was wounded during World War I but recovered and lived to 101. His grandfather's story piqued Nelson's interest in the men who served and fought alongside his grandfather, enough so that he tracks down the descendants of those who didn't come home from France and digs through the records to tell their stories.

The result is uneven, more journalism than history. For example, Nelson includes details on just how he found those descendants, right down to quotations of dull e-mails he received in reply. Some readers might find that interesting; I do not. His reporting does unearth stories that deserve to be told, stories about the backgrounds of soldiers or their service in the war. None in itself is particularly noteworthy; the effect lies in the stories considered as a whole, conveying the diversity and character of this group of men and offering a (necessarily limited) snapshot of America and Americans in the early years of the twentieth century. Nelson inserts snippets of contextual information on the history of the war -- for example, the U.S.'s entry or trench warfare -- but these are dull recitations of well-known facts; his focus is on the individuals and their stories, which are generally left to stand on their own and aren't used to draw historical conclusions.

Though Nelson writes well, he occasionally overwrites. At one point, he criticizes the "funereal and patriotic rot and hyperbole" that often fill the stories of fallen soldiers, but he himself often resorts to just that kind of language to describe them, once referring to them as "noble hearts."

I'd recommend this for decent reading, but not for historical insight. Any comparison to Paul Fussell -- as Ron Powers makes in his blurb -- is far from the mark.



4 out of 5 stars Machine gun fire, poison gas, tanks and aeroplanes   January 19, 2010
Dave Schwinghammer (Little Falls, Minnesota USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

James Carl Nelson's original purpose was to find out more about his grandfather, John Nelson, who, as a private in WWI was wounded by machine gun fire at the Battle of Cantigny and spent the night in a wheat field before being rescued by a couple of Algerian stretcher bearers.

John Nelson then spent the rest of the war in a hospital before returning to his career as a house painter in America. John Nelson was a taciturn man who never talked about the war except for one day a year, July 19th, the day he was wounded, when he took the day off to spend with his wife picnicking. While researching his grandfather, James Carl Nelson became more interested in his grandfather's unit, Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, United States First Division and wanted to tell its story.

John Nelson arrived in France just in time for the first great battle the AEF, under Black Jack Pershing, was involved in, the Battle of Cantigny. Warfare was different in the 20th Century and it wasn't just the trench warfare with the rats and the lice and the poison gas; soldiers also had to face machine gun fire and much more accurate artillery fire, aided by "aeroplanes" acting as spotters. There were also tanks but they proved to be sitting ducks for the artillery.

Most of THE REMAINS OF COMPANY D is about the doughboys who fought for America in WWI, but there is the occasional mention of historical figures like Marshal Foch, Black Jack Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur.
As Pershing and the other generals arrived in France, the Germans were making a final push toward the Marne and it looked like they might accomplish their goal, but Pershing noticed the middle of the German line was extended much like the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. He convinced Foch and the other Allied leaders that they could cut the Germans off at the neck and bag the whole shebang. This led to one of the greatest battles of the war, The Battle of Berzy-le-Sec, in which the 28th Infantry unit , which was down to, like, 500 men, charged machine gun fire and artillery and superior numbers to take the town. Nelson insists this victory could have ended the war if Marshal Foch had been a little quicker on the uptake. Instead, thousands more Americans and Allied soldiers died during the Battle of Meuse-Argonne.

Nelson provides a picture section of some of the doughboys involved. They include some of the heroes mentioned in the book: Lieutenant Marvin Everett Stainton, Private Rollin Livick, Lieutenant Jason Lloyd Bronston, Lieutenant William Dwight Warren (the last two heroes of Berzy-le-Sec) and Private Leigh Ellsworth Wilson. Nelson combed through newspaper accounts and private letters. One of the most poignant episodes is the case of Private Rollin Livick, who was wounded in the jaw, made it back to an aid station and then disappeared while on his way to Paris for reconstructive surgery. His father wrote letter after letter to the authorities, but never got any satisfaction.

World War I is the world war that time forgot, and James Carl Nelson gives us a better idea of what these true heroes faced. And if I'm not mistaken there's only one WWI veteran left, so it's about time.



3 out of 5 stars The Remains of Company D   January 18, 2010
James E. Duffy (Belvedere, SC)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful

The book is more of a critique of the actions of a group of people within a military organization and is not told as a "story". It is sporadic and moves from person to person and place to place in a less than concise manner. Difficult to follow.

Showing reviews 1-5 of 22


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