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War Comes Home: The Legacy

A research guide to support the War Comes Home exhibit and author event at the Gavilan College Library. The exhibit runs 3/16/15-4/26/15. The author event featuring Andrew Carroll is 3/19/15 at 6pm in SS210.

Andrew Carroll - Author Event

Join us Thursday, March 19th, 6pm in SS210 for a conversation with special guest Andrew Carroll.

  • Andrew Carroll is the curator of the War Comes Home: The Legacy exhibit as well as the author of several books and the play If All the Sky Were Paper.
  • Andrew has also contributed to two PBS documentaries based on his books, War Letters and Operation Homecoming.
  • Andrew brings original letters of high-interest and value, including one from an American soldier about what he's just witnessed at the Dachau Concentration Camp...on Hitler's official stationary.

Andrew Carroll Bio from Random House website:

Andrew Carroll, 37, is the editor of several bestselling books, including Letters of a Nation, Behind the Lines, and War Letters, which was made into a PBS documentary. He is also the editor of Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, based on the National Endowment for the Arts national initiative of the same name. “Operation Homecoming,” the documentary, will appear on PBS starting in April 2007.

Carroll’s most recent book is Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War, published by Doubleday and WaterBrook Press.

Carroll is the founder and director of the Legacy Project, a national, all-volunteer initiative that works to honor and remember U.S. troops and veterans by preserving their wartime correspondence. To date, the Legacy Project has received more than 80,000 never-before-seen letters and e-mails from every military conflict in American history.

Carroll is also the co-founder, with the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, which distributes free poetry books to the public in hospitals, schools, jury waiting rooms, train stations, hotels, airports, supermarkets, libraries, and similar venues. Since 1993, the APL Project has handed out more than 1,000,000 free poetry books to people from all walks of life.

In 2001, Carroll revived the "Armed Services Editions" (ASEs), which are pocket-sized books made especially for the military and handed out to U.S. troops abroad. More than 1,300 titles in all were first published during World War II, including mysteries, biographies, crime stories, adventure novels, and classic works of literature. The original ASEs were discontinued in 1947, and Carroll has been working with major publishers to reissue them. He has distributed a quarter of a million free ASEs to U.S. servicemen and women around the world, including thousands of books he personally handed out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Carroll is considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on wartime correspondence, and his efforts have been profiled on Oprah, NBC's Nightly News, FOX News, CNN, The History Channel (two different documentaries), C-Span, National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Nightline (which devoted a full broadcast to the Legacy Project). Carroll was also featured as a “Person of the Week” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Carroll has also been a contributing editor and/or writer to many local and national publications, including Guideposts, Time, the New Yorker, and National Geographic.

A 1993 magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University, Carroll has received, among other accolades, the DAR’s Medal of Honor; The Order of Saint Maurice, bestowed by the National Infantryman's Association; and The Free Spirit Award, presented by the Freedom Forum. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Andrew Carroll Bibliography

  • Here is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (2014) - ISBN 0307463982
  • War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars * (2001) - ISBN 9780743410069
  • War Letters: Stories of Courage, Longing and Sacrifice* (2001) - DVD - ISBN 0780638026
  • Letters of a Nation* (1999) - ISBN 0767903315
  • Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters -- and One Man's Search to Find Them* (2006) - ISBN 9780743256179
  • Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War (2007) - ISBN 1400073375
  • Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (2006) - ISBN 0226094995
  • Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience* (2007) - DVD - ISBN 1422902103

*Titles are available for check-out