Saving Isaiah—Martin Sieff page 55Isaiah Berlin: A Life,

TOM BROKAW, the NBC television anchorman, came to the idea for this book while working in 1984 on a documentary about the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landing. Recalling his own experiences as an Army brat—he was born in 1940 and lived on a military base in South Dakota—and plodding ahead with the television special, Brokaw began to see those who had fought the war and won the peace, those who had come of age during the Depression and gone on to combat abroad and valuable work at home during the early 1940s, as unique. The “greatest generation any society has produced.”

This idea germinated over the years, and the author began to assemble what is a remarkable chronicle of this generation, interviewing just shy of 50 individuals and telling their stories succinctly and feelingly. With a certain amount of revisionist pontificating—this was, after all, not a war without its opponents on the home front—and with a tendency now and then to moralize when a more dispassionate recitation of events and attitudes might have served him better, Brokaw nonetheless succeeds in demonstrating (if not totally proving) his point about the generation’s superb qualities.

MI

About the Author

Michael Ignatieff

Featured Tags

TOM BROKAW, the NBC television anchorman, came to the idea for this book while working in 1984 on a documentary about the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landing. Recalling his own experiences as an Army brat—he was born in 1940 and lived on a military base in South Dakota—and plodding ahead with the television special, Brokaw began to see those who had fought the war and won the peace, those who had come of age during the Depression and gone on to combat abroad and valuable work at home during the early 1940s, as unique. The “greatest generation any society has produced.”

This idea germinated over the years, and the author began to assemble what is a remarkable chronicle of this generation, interviewing just shy of 50 individuals and telling their stories succinctly and feelingly. With a certain amount of revisionist pontificating—this was, after all, not a war without its opponents on the home front—and with a tendency now and then to moralize when a more dispassionate recitation of events and attitudes might have served him better, Brokaw nonetheless succeeds in demonstrating (if not totally proving) his point about the generation’s superb qualities.