The Greatest Generation
Tom Brokaw, 1998
Tom Brokaw's oral history of Americans who came of age in the Depression and fought World War II, told through ordinary lives that shaped the century.
Tom Brokaw
Brokaw was NBC Nightly News anchor when he wrote it; the book grew from his reporting and a 1994 trip to Normandy for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
Feels like memory, nostalgia and grief.
Nostalgia can make a house feel smaller.
Many of them had been born just twenty years earlier than I, in a time of national promise, optimism, and prosperity, when all things seemed possible as the United States was swiftly taking its place as the most powerful nation in the world. World War I was over, America’s industrial might was coming of age with the rise of the auto industry and the nascent communications industry, Wall Street was booming, and the popular culture was rich with the likes of Babe Ruth, Eugene O’Neill, D. W. Griffith, and a new author on the scene, F. Scott Fitzgerald. What those unsuspecting infants could not have realized, of course, was that these were temporary conditions, a false spring to a life that would be buffeted by winds of change dangerous and unpredictable, so fierce that they threatened not just America but the very future of the planet. Books by Tom Brokaw
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