The Remains of Company D

August 10, 2009
Nelson's grandfather fought in WWI. Wounded in 1917, he survived until 1993 but said little about his experience. Inheriting only his grandfather's dog tag, a Purple Heart and a few postcards, Nelson, a former staff writer for the Miami Herald
, resolved to tell his story and that of his 250-man company. Using these scraps, old newspaper accounts, government archives, secondary sources and a good deal of imagination, Nelson delivers biographies of dozens of young men, poor and middle-class, swept into the American Expeditionary Force and shipped to France, where General Pershing, anxious to prove the superiority of American fighting men (and convinced that trench warfare was for sissies), flung them at German lines, where they performed magnificently but suffered terrible casualties. Despite a dearth of primary material (no diaries turned up), Nelson delivers a creditable performance, bringing to life an America of 90 years ago in which many eagerly answered their president's call, but others (Nelson's grandfather among them) went about their business until drafted and then dutifully joined the carnage. 16 pages of b&w photos.

The author resurrects the history of his grandfather and fellow soldiers in WWI. His stream-of-consciousness writing style--full of incomplete sentences--aims at verisimilitude but lacks even minimal organization. Narrator Ray Porter reads the words one at a time, unable to fuse them into a connected flow. He makes not the slightest effort to individualize the voices from hundreds of quotes, making it difficult to distinguish who the person speaking might be. Without maps and without the spellings, most English-speaking listeners would never divine the oft-mentioned locations of Cantigny, Soissons, and the Meuse-Argonne. The story conveys the senseless casualties of WWI but fails to impart any understanding of why it all happened. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine