The Greatest Generation
 Tom Brokaw
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1998 Random House New York USA
  ISBN: 0375502025


Tom Brokaw tells the stories of the men & women, the heroes & heroines who came of age during the Great Depression & the Second World War, & who went on to build modern America.

"...At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible..."

This is such an absorbing read. Here is Tom Brokaw, writing as he speaks, with fluent, descriptive insights. Cogent details that set the scenes of the stories of this generation who, three score years ago, readily gave up their futures to either go to war or do the support work for the war effort.

Here are the youngsters borne from the ashes of the War To End All Wars; gaining in years even as their nation & those around the world first soared in the post-war hysteria only to plummet later into the Great Depression. Through that decade when odd jobs & youth often were the only thing between poverty & hunger until, emerging from schools across the country, the men were called to arms & the women filled the places left behind.

Tom Brokaw takes us on his trek to Normandy, France for the 40th anniversary of D-Day, where the stirrings of an idea began. A decade later, in time for the 50th anniversary of that momentous, world-changing invasion & rescue, with all its accompanying media coverage - Tom Brokaw was there again, this time more conversant with so much of what had happened to whom, when & how. From Tom's sense of awe, respect & gratitude to this generation who literally saved the world both in Europe & in the Pacific, we are gifted the life stories of these happy few, these chosen few.

Tom Brokaw & his team have chosen their heroes & heroines well. Not only are there familiar famous names, we are introduced to others of that quiet generation. Tom, only a couple of years older than me, also has memories of the home front, with all the men in uniforms or laboring in military camps. That many of the stories intertwine or run parallel reminds us of how few the many were. It also reminds us of a time when a man's oath held power & when a woman's stature was in her deliberate steadfastness.

It's enough that Tom Brokaw has spoken with all sorts of veterans, both military & civilian; the privileged upper-class whites as well as the scrabble-poor whites; the experience of being black in a white army; of being black & female in a white society; of being a U.S. Citizen of Japanese heritage, seeing the smoke columns rise over Pearl Harbor & plunging into a week-long Red Cross aid for the casualties.

These are the stories of my parents & their siblings - except my childhood happened on the other side of the Atlantic in a small Surrey village where soldiers built air-raid shelters under lawns & Land Girls helped wives take care of evacuee children, one of whom was me.

While these Americans returned home to infuse a war-weary nation with verve & discipline in the workplace, they also ousted the workforce of women so they could go home & have the celebratory babies & help their husbands through their GI Bill educations. Many Americans stayed overseas to ensure the peace, protect from communist incursion & encourage rebuilding. This then is where I met my first Americans - over in London to implement the Marshall Plan. My mother drove the wives around, sight-seeing & shopping, I tagged along as package-bearer & historical guide.

What a superb effort The Greatest Generation is & you know how seamless Tom Brokaw makes the telling of a story. An invaluable effort. This book is not only recommended, I urge everyone to read, to remember, to realize that our seniors now once put their lives on the line that we might know freedom, prosperity & an individual way of life.

I have seen the now rare license plates designating Pearl Harbor Survivors & in a burgeoning town east of us, there are thousands of seniors now settling into a retirement of light-hearted fun & society - what they missed at that earlier time in their lives, when they were busy saving the world. Lest We Forget!
(06/06/99)

Rebecca