Books like The Greatest Generation

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

Your income has always been ample, and you never ought to have borrowed any money, and Mary Towle did a great wrong in lending you any money. My opinion of you is the same as it always has been—that you are an extravagant, deceitful, dishonest, worthless person. You have squandered thousands of dollars and left your honest debts unpaid. But I do not think you are capable of comprehending the mistakes that you have made. Now that you are paying up Mary Towle, how would it do to pay the various other accounts that you owe?

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

For without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men — such as the subjects of this book — have lived. The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers, and pressures — and that is the basis of all human morality. In whatever area in life one may meet the challenges of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience — the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men — each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.

During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers; from Estes Kefauver amid the snows of New Hampshire to Jack Nicklaus amid the azaleas of Augusta, Georgia; from Henry Kaiser’s Liberty ships to Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth sailing into Staten Island at one in the morning; from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood; from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s last stand to the massacre of Muhammad Ali by Joe Frazier.

When we arrived on the Vineyard in March of 2020, the nest was empty. The birds were still warming themselves in the southern hemisphere, perhaps beginning their pilgrimage back to the island, making their way over the Caribbean Sea and Florida, continuing north, hugging the coastline, as a virus, first found in China, made its own explosive journey through the United States. My husband and I walked around the pole in our wool hats and parkas, our boots sinking in the marsh. The nest was intact, unchanged from the previous fall. Even in the bitter air, even with sharp sticks poking out of every side, it looked strong and stable. Welcoming. We smiled at each other and talked about the couple’s return. Would we be here to see it?