The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War

by David Laskin

Overview

In The Long Way Home, award-winning writer David Laskin traces the lives of a dozen men who left their childhood homes in Europe, journeyed through Ellis Island, and started over in a strange land–only to cross the Atlantic again in uniform when their adopted country entered the Great War.

Though they had known little of America outside of tight-knit ghettos and backbreaking labor, these foreign-born conscripts were rapidly transformed into soldiers, American soldiers, in the ordeal of war. Two of the men in this book won the Medal of Honor. Three died in combat. Those who survived were profoundly altered–and their heroic service reshaped their families and ultimately the nation itself.

Epic, inspiring, and masterfully written, this book is an unforgettable true story of the Great War, the world it remade, and the humble, loyal men who became Americans by fighting for America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061233340
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	03/15/2011
Series:	P.S. Series
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	213,883
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Laskin is the author of The Children's Blizzard, winner of the Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award for nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian magazine. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Table of Contents

Twelve Who Served xi

Introduction xv

Chapter 1 Old Countries 1

Chapter 2 Journeys 23

Chapter 3 Streets of Gold 44

Chapter 4 The Weak, the Broken, and the Mentally Crippled 65

Chapter 5 The World at War 79

Chapter 6 The Army of Forty-Three Languages 122

Chapter 7 I Go Where You Send Me 157

Chapter 8 July 4, 1918 173

Chapter 9 These Fought in Any Case 194

Chapter 10 The Jews and the Wops and the Dirty Irish Cops 221

Chapter 11 The Arc of Fire 242

Chapter 12 Breaking the Line 255

Chapter 13 Blanc Mont 271

Chapter 14 Why Should I Shoot Them? 296

Chapter 15 Postwar 312

Acknowledgments 351

Sources 359

Index 373

What People are Saying About This

Erik Larson

“Moving, revealing, and lovingly researched, this book is a must read, and a great read, for any of us whose forebears came from overseas-meaning just about all of us.”

From the Publisher

"[A] quietly absorbing glimpse of some of the brave soldiers who helped win WWI." —-Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

David Laskin’s The Long Way Home is a brilliant blending of social analysis and personal narrative, which recovers the experience of a ‘lost generation’—the immigrant ‘greenhorns’ who became Americans through service on the battlefields of World War I.

Richard Slotkin

Moving, revealing, and lovingly researched, this book is a must read, and a great read, for any of us whose forebears came from overseas-meaning just about all of us.

Erik Larson

A riveting remembrance of the Great War by a master writer. David Laskin, by homing in on the lives of a dozen immigrants to Ellis Island, is able to tell a grand American saga about the true cost of democracy. All around a deeply compelling narrative.

Douglas Brinkley

Laskin’s tracing of young immigrants, figuratively and literally, from Ellis Island to the trenches of World War I France blends moving personal stories, sociology, culture and military history. The result is a marvelous evocation of what it means to become an American and the many paths to that end.

Joseph Persico

Riveting. . . . With the epic history of the Great War as his backdrop, Laskin has vividly brought these extraordinary, colorful men to life and created, overall, an absolute masterpiece.

Andrew Carroll

David Laskin’s latest, The Long Way Home, reads with the heart-quickening pace of a novel as he focuses his gaze on a band of real-life characters who emigrated to the United States in the years just before World War I.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune

[America is] never perfect, never static, never finished. We are constantly enriched by new blood, energy and ideas. As Barack Obama put it in his inaugural address, "Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness." In this compelling book, Laskin makes this same point by following the lives of 12 American doughboys who had been born in Europe and who then returned there to fight for their adopted country in World War I. It's an imaginative concept, and Laskin mines family legends and official documents to tell the stories of these ordinary foot soldiers from Italy and Ireland, Poland and Russia, Slovakia and Norway.
—The Washington Post

Steven V. Roberts

At the height of America’s involvement in the Great War, nearly one in five of the 4.7 million Americans in uniform had been born overseas. Laskin (The Children’s Blizzard) chronicles the lives of 12 of these men who immigrated from Europe. The soldiers’ loyalty and pride in serving won them and their families the status of “real” Americans. Meyer Epstein, a Russian-Jewish plumber from New York’s Lower East Side, who had been living by his wits and muscle, was eventually awarded four Bronze Stars; marching with the American army through France was not much worse than his youth hauling junk around the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement with a horse and cart. Charming and fastidious Tony Pierro, a southern Italian gardener, drove horse-drawn supply wagons to and from the front in France, bringing munitions in and carting corpses out. Andrew Christofferson, drafted from his Montana homestead, was hungrier in the trenches in France than he’d been as a poor boy in Norway. This quietly absorbing glimpse of some of the brave soldiers who helped win WWI will appeal to history buffs. 16 pages of photos. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] quietly absorbing glimpse of some of the brave soldiers who helped win WWI." —-Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Laskin follows 12 men, born in Europe, who emigrated to America, made lives here, and eventually found themselves in the American Expeditionary Force of World War I. They mostly left tight-knit communities of immigrants—Italians, Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Russians, and Irish—to fight in Europe, but they returned as Americans, a sea change that affected the nation ever after. Strongly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/09.]

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