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Growing Up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation
Broadway
May 2005
304 pages
ISBN: 0767914201
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
It is fair to say that Tom Mathews’s relations with his
father, a veteran of World War II’s fabled 10th Mountain
Division, were terrible. He came back from the war to a
young son he’d barely met and proceeded to bully and
browbeat him—for his own good, he thought. In the course of
puzzling out almost fifty years of intermittent conflict,
Mathews came to understand that their problems were not
simply personal, they were generational—and widely shared
by millions of other baby boomer sons. And so, to write
this powerful book, which traces the kinetic effect of the
war on the men who fought it, their sons, and their
grandsons, Mathews has uncovered nine other dramatic and
telling father-son tales of veterans in some ways missing
in action and how internal war wounds shaped their lives as
fathers. These include a combat infantryman whose life was
saved by the fabled Audie Murphy, and a black member of the
storied Tuskegee Airmen corps. In a moving final chapter,
he and his father return together to Italy to revisit
scenes from the war—and attempt, at long last, to forge
their own separate peace. In a very real sense, Our Fathers’ War tells the
secret history of World War II and its echoes down the
years and generations. In the course of doing so, it offers
a portrait of evolving styles of American manhood that
many, many fathers and sons have been needing and awaiting.
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