A Dear and Noble Boy by Louis Stokes

A Dear and Noble Boy by Louis Stokes

Louis Stokes was a pupil at Rugby School between 1911 and 1915 before he joined the Royal Marines Light Infantry and met his death on the Somme in November 1916. His letters, published in this volume, offer an insight into this typical transition from cloistered public school to the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front. Not only do they provide an amusing and intelligent account of life at Rugby, but such are Stokes's sharp eye for detail that his weekly letters home also offer an understanding of some of the influences that shaped the outlook of a public-school pupil on the eve of the Great War. Stokes was forced to justify to his pacifist father his reasons for responding to the call of arms, and during the course of intense family debate much is revealed about the motives and values of one of those who were swept along on the tide of patriotic fervour that characterized the early years of the war. Louis Stokes was not an outstanding scholar, and nor did he meet with a glorious death, but his letters are a memorial to that generation of schoolboys who lost their lives.

Louis Stokes was raised in Cleveland's projects, the son of a single mother who lost her husband when Louis was three. He was also the brother of former Cleveland mayor, Carl Stokes, who, before being elected as Cleveland's first African American mayor, was elected as the first African American Democrat in the state legislature.

David Chanoff has written on current affairs, foreign policy, education, refugee issues, literary history, and other subjects for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The American Scholar. He is the author or coauthor of fifteen books.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780850524253
ISBN 10	0850524253
Title	A Dear and Noble Boy
Author	Louis Stokes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Year published	1994-07-14
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.