cover image The GI Generation: A Memoir

The GI Generation: A Memoir

Frank F. Mathias. University Press of Kentucky, $30 (267pp) ISBN 978-0-8131-2157-4

Although it meanders as a narrative, this vividly recalled, detail-rich memoir fixes its gaze on a vanished Kentucky Depression childhood in a telling resonant with the hardships and frail innocence of between-the-wars America. Mathias (G.I. Jive), professor emeritus of history at the University of Dayton, was born in 1925 and raised in a town of 1,500; his father was a traveling grocery salesman, and his early childhood was a marked mixture of the isolated, agrarian milieu and the deprivation that battered the nation. Mathias sharply etches details of this time: as with the New Deal programs that transformed his region, he notes the strange confluence of rurality with the fears and wonders provoked by technology, economic fluctuations and war clouds. Throughout, the author is understandably haunted by ex post facto consideration of how many of his pals and mentors would soon be devoured by war; he does a fine job of explicating how the triumph over fascism of these Depression-tested small-town lads ironically sparked the dissolution of their homegrown, wholesome ways. His book is good enough to make one wish it were better. Although the book's pace is rather sedate--and Mathias too often contextualizes his era through withering contrast with the two generations (Boomers and Gen-Xers) that followed--this remains a sobering, well-considered and engrossing portrait of ordinary life in a tumultuous era. 66 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)