by Doris Kearnas Goodwin
“John Adams evoked in me a deep sense of loss for the ideals for which — against all odds — they fought. This feeling of loss resonated for me; it was one I felt for years about many of the promises of my generation, those born at the end of and after the Second World War in a “baby boom,” an explosion of their parents’ hope and optimism. The feeling had persisted remarkably, given that at the time I was reading John Adams — 2001 — I was 56 years old.
I found the John Adams book to be so motivating that I began to read biographies of our Presidents to fill out the timeline from Adams until today, with no clearly defined road map but with a sudden, renewed interest.
As I read my way haphazardly through American (and occasionally world) history, I read the lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt (A Traitor to His Class), and Harry Truman. I read a history of Jamestown, a biography of Franklin and Eleanor, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals, William Manchester’s extraordinary tale of the Pacific War, Goodbye Darkness, and his two volumes on the life of Winston Churchill. And during this process it dawned on me that the history with which I was most familiar, my own, did not seem to be represented in a way that did it justice; there was nothing that seemed to capture my own era in its fullness.* I wondered to myself whether I was alone in my sense that any of this mattered. But I found it mattered deeply to me, if only so I might leave something for my young son. And while I suspect that it is not unusual for people’s interest in history to increase as they get older, my interest is not academic. I believe the history of my generation has been reduced to that of a cartoon. Steal my history? Steal my life.” (From ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY )
