Greatest Generation: An Intimate Portrait - Page 2

What Harry Stein has done with his wonderful new book, The Girl Watchers Club, is given us a very human look at inner souls of the people (alas, mostly just the men--but what men they are and were!) of that era.

The Girl Watchers are a group of more than a dozen World War II era men who have been meeting together to joke, chat, and rib each other (the way men so often do) for decades. They started out gathering around a swimming pool to watch women, but soon evolved into a group that just got together socially for its own sake. For decades they've been doing this, involving themselves in each others' lives in a way that few people do today. They don't do much but talk together, but what they talk about speaks volumes.

While the Girl Watchers group actually comprises well over a dozen men, and has comprised dozens if you count its former and deceased members, Stein here opts to intimately profile only six of them, men he feels well represent the entire group. The men he chooses are all distinct in their own way: atheists and deeply religious, combat veterans and men who never saw combat, men who've had happy family lives and men who've had tragic ones, men who grew up in big families and men who grew up as only children.

The only thing these men really have in common is that they're all of a certain age--and there's the center of the tale, for the things they have in common, the shared attitudes and experiences and values, tells you more about the World War II generation than you'll ever get in a hundred books on the Great Depression or World War II. For what Stein shows us is the honor, the integrity, the decency, and the core humanity of these people who did so much to shape what the 20th century became. The stories in this book, which profile the entire lives of all these men from their childhoods all the way into retirement and grandfatherhood, makes you realize just how much that "greatest generation" had to offer, and how much their children and grandchildren could learn from them if only they'd try.

Article Author: Dean Esmay

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