KENNEBUNK  — In Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin introduced readers to a forgotten generation of Americans: the men and women who fought and won the First World War.

Interviewing the war’s last survivors face-to-face, he knew well the importance of being present if you want to get the real story.  But he soon came to realize that to get the whole story, he had to go Over There, too.  So he did, and discovered that while most Americans regard that war as dead and gone, to the French, who still live among its ruins and memories, it remains very much alive.

Years later, with the centennial of the war only magnifying this paradox, Rubin decided to go back Over There to see if he could, at last, resolve it.  For months he followed the trail of the American
Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, finding trenches, tunnels, bunkers, century-old graffiti and ubiquitous artifacts.  

But he also found an abiding fondness for America and Americans, and a colorful corps of local after-hours historians and archeologists who tirelessly explore these sites and preserve the memories they embody while patiently waiting for Americans to return and reclaim their own history and heritage.  None of whom seemed to mind that his French needed work.

Based on his wildly popular New York Times series, Back Over There is a timely journey, in turns reverent and iconoclastic but always fascinating, through a place where the past and present are never really separated.

Co-sponsored by Kennebunk Free Library, the Kennebunk Free Library Genealogy Group and the Brick Store Museum, Rubin will appear at the Brick Store Museum’s Program Center (4 Dane St. just behind the Museum) on Saturday, June 3 at 10 a.m.  Books will be available for purchase through Nonesuch Books and a signing will follow the discussion.

Richard Rubin is the author of Back Over There from St. Martin’s Press. He is also the author of The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War and Confederacy of
Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, as well as scores of pieces for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian, among others.

A fifth-generation New Yorker, he now lives in small-town Maine, which baffles his neighbors.

Please visit KFL’s website for links to Richard Rubin media including an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered and his most recent appearance on the PBS documentary, The Great War, which was created in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into the war on April 6, 1917.

This event is free and open to the public. The Brick Store Museum is at 117 Main Street, Kennebunk (across from KFL).

For more information, call KFL at 985-2173 or visit www.kennebunklibrary.org.