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Read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation in Large Print.
* All Random House Large Print Editions are published in 16-point type
"Within the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. There, I underwent a life-changing experience. WHEN I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had returned because of this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for any they had done. A decade later, I returned to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion, and at that time I needed come to understand what this generation of Americans designed to history. It is, I believe, the best generation any society has ever produced."
In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual women and men the story of a generation, America's citizen heroes and heroines who came old through the Great Depression and the Second World War and continued to generate modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by common values--duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, most importantly, responsibility for oneself. On this book, you will meet people whose everyday lives reveal how a generation persevered through war, and were trained by it, and then continued to build interesting and useful lives and the America we've today.
"At the same time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, these were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible over the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the coral islands of the Pacific. They answered the decision to save the earth from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs. They faced great odds and a late start, nevertheless they didn't protest. They succeeded on every front. They won the war; they saved the earth. They came home to joyous and short-lived celebrations and immediately started the task of rebuilding their lives and the earth they wanted. They married in record numbers and gave birth to some other distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. A grateful nation managed to get easy for more of them to attend college or university than any society had ever educated, anywhere. They gave the earth new science, literature, art, industry, and economical strength unparalleled in the long curve of history. As they now reach the twilight of the adventurous and productive lives, they remain, for the most part, exceptionally modest. They have got so many stories to tell, stories that in many cases they have never told before, because in a deep sense they didn't think that what these were doing was that special, because everyone else was doing it too.
"This book, I am hoping, will in a few small way pay tribute to those women and men who have given us the lives we've today--an American face album of the best generation."
In this book you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the center of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown. You'll hear George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of is own assignments was to learn the mail of the enlisted men under him, to make sure no sensitive military information would be compromised. Therefore, Bush says, "I learned about life." You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the numerous ladies in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war. You'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. And you'll meet the members of the Romeo Club (Retired Old Men EATING DINNER OUT), friends for life.
Through these and other stories in The Greatest Generation, you'll relive with ordinary women and men, military heroes, celebrities of great achievement, and community leaders how these extraordinary times forged the values and provided working out that made a people and a nation great.
