Generation “G”

On Sunday HBO premieres Band of Brothers, a Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg miniseries about World War II paratroopers. (Click here to read Paul Fussell’s rave in Slate.) In 1999, Jacob Weisberg criticized the notion—popularized by Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation and by Speilberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan—that World War II-era Americans constituted “the greatest generation any society has produced.” “To call one generation the ‘greatest’ doesn’t say anything meaningful about that generation,” writes Weisberg. “It does, however, reveal something of what the speaker finds lacking in his own.” (Click here for the article.)