A few nights ago I was channel surfing. I was looking for something to watch. Something new. Something interesting. Something unusual. After searching for several minutes, I landed on something called "BookTV". It turns out that BookTV (www.booktv.org) is a regular production -- 15 years now -- of "top nonfiction authors and books" which airs each weekend on C-SPAN2. This weekend happened to include an author talking about a subject which always piques my interest: World War I. That's right. The First World War. The Great War. The War to End All Wars. In terms of American history, it is one of "the forgotten wars".
The program on BookTV was a presentation by author Richard Rubin who wrote "The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War" (available at Amazon or Barnes & Noble) was fascinating. Rubin tracked down a few dozen World War I vets and got their oral accounts of the war. Keep in mind that each of these veterans was over 100 years old (sadly, all have now passed away), but the impact of going to war in their late teens or early twenties left memories full and vivid. Many of the vets agreed that they could remember events from the War more easily than events from recent history.
At any rate, it was an interesting program and it is available on YouTube, so you don't have to hunt for the schedule on BookTV. (embedding of this video is not allowed by the creators, so here is a link to YouTube)
http://youtu.be/mKMnIBFER9k
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