This is the third and last volume recounting one man's journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.
It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars.
There were, to be sure, periods of peace and growing prosperity for many, especially in the U.S.A. Science and invention exploded, utterly transforming the way we lived and altering our conception of our origins and our place in the universe. Youngsters today say they simply cannot imagine what life was like, say, back in 1904 when I was born, when people got about in horse and buggies, before the automobile, the telephone, electric lighting and power, and central heating came into general use; before there were airplanes, movies, radio and television, oil burners, electric refrigerators, air conditioners, gasoline-driven tractors, paved roads, garages, filling-stations, traffic lights, parking lots, shopping centers, airports, income taxes, social welfare, women's suffrage, computers, VCRs, jet engines, radar, moon landings, napalm bombs, nuclear bombs, space rockets, spaceships, space stations, lasers, and much else that has become commonplace today.
My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man-not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died-thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.
He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful-all tiny biplanes-in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.
"If God had intended us to fly," he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, "He would have given us wings. Let's leave flying to the birds."
Whether all these ingenious mechanical inventions and their fantastic development during the twentieth century have improved the quality of life and given it more depth and meaning, I doubt. They have certainly liberated men-and especially women-from much drudgery, opened horizons not dreamed of at the turn of the century, and speeded up living to such a frantic pace that I often want to get off the merry-go-round and catch my breath and regain my senses.
All these developments have also improved the standard of living of most people immensely, though tens of millions on earth still hunger and remain homeless, a sizable and disgraceful number in the affluent U.S.A. Most of us, at least in the West, are much better off materially than when I was born, but are we better educated, happier, wiser?
For most of the first twenty years of my adult life I worked abroad, and the previous two volumes of these memoirs have dealt largely with the world beyond our shores, principally Europe.
This book has to do with a coming home and what, after so long an absence, it was like to live and work in America during the nearly half a century since the end of the Second World War.
Luck, or fate, or God, or whatever it is that determines the extent of our lives, allowed me to live through most of this tumultuous twentieth century and through a sizable chunk of our country's existence.
In fact, as James Reston reminded me recently, our work as reporters and commentators on our times, stretching as it has over a half century or more, has covered one-fourth of the life of the Republic, in my own case sixty-four of its two hundred years.
For me it has been a long journey, full of ups and downs as with most lives, but wonderful and exciting and perplexing and troubling almost all the way.
