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Last Letters Home (Hardcover)

~ Senator John McCain (Foreword)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

War letters are, by their nature, intensely emotional, honest and heartfelt documents. They are letters like no others, written when the extreme peril of battle forces one to look at life in an entirely new way. Moments and memories are cherished with an urgency they hadn't been before. The future is a dream.

Especially poignant among war letters are the last letters home. These messages may express many things--hope, pride, fear, exhaustion, love--but they take on an extraordinary new weight when the reader brings to them a foreknowledge of what has occurred. The letters in this LIFE book, from Robert Wise's comic pick-me-ups to his mom to Michelle Witmer's and Rachel Bosveld's dramatic accounts of action in Iraq to Jesse Givens's passionate last words to his young family--a letter that he told his wife not to open unless he was killed--give a thoroughly human face to the war in Iraq. Beyond the statistics are these lives, bravely lived.

In Last Letters Home, fourteen families share their stories with LIFE's readers and come before LIFE's cameras, just as several of them participated in the HBO/New York Times project of the same name, which has produced a documentary to air on Veteran's Day, November 11. It took courage for them to publicly recall bygone sons, daughters, spouses and parents. Courage--theirs and the courage of those now departed--is on every page of this book.

From the Publisher

LIFE has long been one of the country's preeminent publishers of periodicals and books, and is renowned for its presentation of photography. This new LIFE volume comes from the team of editors whose ONE NATION: America Remembers September 11, 2001 spent a half year on the New York Time Best Sellers list and was called by the Wall Street Journal "a thorough and thoughtful telling." In the fall of 2004, LIFE, which was originally launched as a weekly magazine in 1936, again began publishing with that frequency.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 127 pages
  • Publisher: CDS (October 18, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1593151632
  • ISBN-13: 978-1593151638
  • Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 9.2 x 2.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #664,144 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Average Customer Review
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing, meaningful, heart-wrenching, November 11, 2004
When I was a student of political science, I had a professor who read to us letters home from the war front. He had a collection of pieces from lots of different countries, but messages were remarkably the same - human beings caught up in situations and conflict far beyond their making and often beyond our comprehension, not writing for king and country, but writing of home, writing to home.

This collection follows many fine examples of this genre, from fourteen families; these letters are made all the more meaningful and poignant by the fact that their authors didn't return home alive. The concerns are very basic, but take on a palpable feel to them for the reader today -- care for home, family, plans for the future, honest emotion including fear. This collection spans the range of people from the most recent conflict -- it shows that many of the aspects of war are depressingly the same, no matter what historical era one is in.

The courage of the families to put forward this kind of emotional part of their lives is matched only by the courage of the men and women who themselves lost their lives. The book, companion to a documentary produced by HBO, strives to be non-political; far from being an indictment of the current administration, it focuses instead upon the people involved at the 'ground level' of the conflict. Many of the families are in fact supporters of President Bush, firm in their convictions that the sacrifice of their loved ones was done in the name of democracy and the country.

There is a forward by Senator John McCain, himself a veteran with experiences to tell, but even his family did not suffer the fate of receiving a last letter home from him.

On this Veteran's Day, originally Armistice Day, after the war-to-end-all-wars (that in fact did not), it is proper to remember also those involved in the current struggles, which includes families back home, whose connection is largely through letters, and whose prayers are always that there will be another letter soon, that no letter becomes the last letter home.

Read a part of our current affairs that will become a part of history in these letters, from the perspective of those actually doing the work in Iraq.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Last Letters Home, November 20, 2004
I read this book on a flight from Houston to Raliegh. The young man sitting next to me was riveted. He read the book over my shoulder. He wondered how I could read a book like this after I told him my son was in the 3rd Infantry Division. My son was in Iraq from March 2003 to August 2003 and returns in January.

I told him books like these are important in keeping us in touch with the reality of what we face over there. All Americans should feel the pain along with the families of the soldiers who have died. This book brings home the painful reality.

I, too, was compelled to write our story for this very reason. Our son came home and for that we are forever grateful. Yet I want people to know the complexity of emotion that raged through my family while he was there. My book can be found on Amazon and is called "Letters Home - From 9/11 to Operation Iraqi Freedom A Military Mom Shares Her Family's Story of Patriotism, Courage and Love."

Thank you to the families who so painfully have shared their lives with us.

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