Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
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Somewhere about the 700th page of this 412-page book, I had the feeling of having heard this all before. In Tom Brokaw’s clumsy book, The Greatest Generation turns out to sound like the longest winded. I mean no disrespect to the newsmen’s subjects. As a baby-boomer, I grew up with tales of the Depression and of the War. Although my parents were married after World War II, without the great stirring and shaking of that war, it is unlikely that they (growing up some hundred miles apart) would have met on a military base in Georgia and married on a military base in Alaska.
If we are going to build monuments, let them be monuments with more substance. Limiting himself to celebration, Brokaw also limits his possibilities. So many of the stories—each interesting on its own—seem like so much padding. As I’ve scouted out opinions on this book, I have more than once heard it compared to the writing in USA Today or People Magazine, what one would expect from a television personality and his ghostwriters. Info-tainment. The people seem as unlikely as characters on Dr. Quinn, with all the depth of a thirty-second sound-bite.
I began reading this book wanting to like it. There is something about it that still nags at me. What a great idea! (But, yes, Terkel had it first.) How necessary! We Americans are losing our stories. And I have lost as many as anyone. I still think there is value in this book—not enough to buy it, perhaps, but to check it out from the library, read a few chapters, and use it as a starting point for your own dialogue with your parents or children. The section "Love, Marriage, and Commitment," for example, shows how far we’ve come, for better or for worse.
I notice lately that friends my age say that their children have no interest in hearing about their experiences in the Vietnam War. Perhaps this book and the three World War II movies that were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture can start an effort to conserve a great national resource that we are losing, just as Alex Haley’s Roots once did.
Two aspects of the book, however, make me very uncomfortable. First, although the author and I pretty much are on the same side of the political fence, he turns the book into such a political diatribe at times that I wonder whether he should give the other party a chance to make a rebuttal. Then, one wonders if the author truly thinks of his book as The Greatest Generation or The Greatest Me. There is almost too much about the Brokaw family and entirely too much about the Brokaw himself, although he does not fit chronologically into the book. On more than one occasion, the author pats himself on the shoulder. Telling of his experience with a book of the great cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s work, Brokaw lets us in on a personal revelation that I could do without. "Initially, I was pleased that I could recite from memory many of the cartoon captions."
There are memorable characters in this book. Brokaw divides the book into the stories of "Ordinary People" (almost a contradiction in terms of this book's scheme) and "Famous People." Much as I tried to get involved with the "ordinary"—surely these are my people—it is a sign of the superficiality of this book that it just does not happen. And so, I will let the last voice of this review be a famous one, that of television chef and sometimes "a sort of spy" for the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), Julia Child. The war not only stirred up the population of this country, it also shook this country to its foundations, nowhere more than in the roles of women. When Child is asked what would have happened to her if there had been no World War II, she replies, "Who knows? I might have ended up an alcoholic, since there wasn’t anything to do."
Till next time, don’t spend all your time on the Internet. Read a good book, share some stories with your family, and keep your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts.