On June 6, 2024, as Tom Hanks, Christine Amanpour, Joseph Biden and the surviving veterans who stormed the beaches at Normandy gathered to commemorate the 80th anniversary of that momentous day, someone noted that there were fewer years between the end of the Civil war (1865) and that beach landing (1944) = 79 years and the time between D-Day and it's 80th anniversary.
I can recall, as a boy in 1953, there were still Civil War veterans alive who held reunions, and attended commenorations at battlefields and got trucked out for July 4th parades, 88 years later. If you were 12 years old, and drummer boy, you were a Civil War Vet. If you were 103, and there were vets who lived to that age, you might have been a soldier.
So the newly discovered story by E.L. Doctorow published in this week's New Yorker held special fascination for me.
I do not know all of E.L. Doctorow's work--I read "Ragtime" and liked it well enough.
But this, for my money, is a masterpiece.
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