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| Our Fathers' War: Growing Up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation | 
| Author: Tom Mathews
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $4.47
You Save: $20.48 (82%)
New (28) from $4.47
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 565345
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0767914201
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.92092
EAN: 9780767914208
ASIN: 0767914201
Publication Date: May 10, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New, perfect, never used. From a high rated seller.
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Review of Our Father's War March 5, 2006
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I thought this book was well written and thought out. I am 50 years old and the son of a deceased WWII veteran. While it did not answer all my questions it helped me a great deal in attempting to understand my father and the way he was. God Bless Tom Mathews for his poignant and touching tale.
 Boomer whining November 19, 2005
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
this book is just another example of the blame game... nobody takes responsibility for their own actions... couldn't it be your father was a jerk before he went to the war... i don't doubt that the war had a profound effect on them, but so did the depression in which most of them grew up... my father was in the war, saw allot of combat, was at the liberation of a concentration camp, and came home and raised his family with love and kindness. he didn't feel like he needed to psychoanalyze the whole experience... he shielded his kid's from the war because it was ugly and talked about it only with his fellow soldiers... what's so wrong with that...
Incredible insight October 9, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
A must for any child or spouse of a combat veteran (any war).
Dad Didn't Know Best October 5, 2005
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is very good at getting to the core of why so many sons of "The Greatest Generation" didn't have good relationships with their fathers after they returned from war.
Sons reminisce about their struggles with fathers'spirits that were "killed by the war", leaving them empty and ill- equipped to raise sons after their horrifying ordeals. They wanted their sons to be without cowardise, "like little soldiers" leaving no room for what they thought were mistakes.
This book arrived in A-1 condition.
 Fathers and Sons of War. September 20, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Written from the viewpoint of the innocent sons who were mistreated by fathers who had served in WWII, it attempts to explain that the abuse was not personal but generalized. Those vetrans who survived atrocities, which left internal war wounds, took out their suppressed aggression on their own sons by bullying and browbeating them. My dad was physically abusive to his two son so much so that the elder got married at the age of seventeen just to get away from home. He would chase them up the highway in a wild tantrum hitting them with anything he was able to lay his hands on. The younger took his revenge fifty years later by putting him in a barren room at a nursing home to die.
Dubbed a secret history, it echoes down through the years and generations, from sons to grandsons. It's a sad history of evolving manhood. Could be that's why the baby boomers of today still talk like boys instead of men -- their masculine growth was stunted in childhood.
Men refuse to talk openly about their deepest feelings. War changes men's lives as combat shapes the soldier to survive at all odds. After the War, those feelings don't just vanish. The fear and harshness they endured is taken out on their own sons on the homefront, as they continue to fight their internal devils.
No anonymity here; they believed that candor offers the surest approach to the mystery of their military fathers and why they acted as they did with the guilt they could not dissipate. It's true -- you always hurt the one you love by saying and doing the wrong things.
Tom Matthews is the author of STANDING FREE about Roy Wilkes during the Civil Rights upheaval.
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