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The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. By Kriste Lindenmeyer. (Chicago: Dee, 2005. xiv, 304 pp. $27.50, ISBN 1-56663-660-4.)
The Greatest Generation Grows Up, by Kriste Lindenmeyer, is a remarkably compelling and enlightening account of the children who came of age in the 1930s. Lindenmeyer borrows her title from Tom Brokaw, who nostalgically referred to the individuals who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II as "the greatest generation." Lindenmeyer chooses not to contest Brokaw's assessment of the youth of that era. However, hers is a work of serious historical scholarship that captures rather than memorializes the many diverse experiences of children growing up during the Great Depression.
Stories of newsboys and bootblacks, Mexican students who contested segregation, and children who pleaded with Eleanor Roosevelt to help...