The greatest regeneration: the American dream can be revived, says Tom Brokaw, if we can overcome our disunity, and universal national service is the key.

• Author: Wofford, Harris
• Position: The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America, Who We Are, Where We've Been, and Where We Need to Go Now, to Recapture the American Dream - Book review

The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America, Who We Are, Where We've Been, and Where We Need to Go Now, to Recapture the American Dream

by Tom Brokaw Random House, 320 pp.

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In this political season, readers of Tom Brokaw's latest book, The Time of Our Lives, might surmise that he's running for office. Like many a candidate's campaign book, it weaves together autobiography, profiles of contemporary average Americans struggling in difficult times, and accounts of innovative grassroots solutions to the great problems of our era. But the only office Brokaw seems to be running for is the unofficial one long held by Walter Cronkite: the media's voice of reason-calming, reassuring, trustworthy, and wholly nonpartisan. Were such a race to be held, the much-admired TV journalist and author might well win.

Brokaw begins the subtitle of his book "A Conversation with America," and starts with the proposition that America has lost its way. He offers a sharp critique of the current state of affairs--a devastated economy, rising competition from abroad, a broken political culture. And as befits the author of The Greatest Generation, he looks to the experiences of those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II for inspiration and ideas on how we can confront our own problems today.

Much of The Time of Our Lives is built around stories about four generations of his own and his wife Meredith's families, and the distance he and Meredith have traveled from their small-town South Dakota roots. Seventy years old and very involved in the lives of his children and grandchildren, Brokaw is deeply concerned about the world being bequeathed to the next generation. He gives voice to the desire that many of us grandparents today have "to make the most of the time remaining." He laments that his own Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers who followed lost the ethos of thrift and shared sacrifice that was second nature to his parents and grandparents. And though he movingly depicts the suffering of families in the current economic downturn, he also sees some hopeful signs of that ethos returning.

Like a TV documentary, the narrative follows Brokaw around on far-flung reporting assignments, introducing readers to individuals making a difference in their own lives and in the life of the country. An out-of-work electrical contractor in Covington, Kentucky, upgrading his skills at a cutting-edge community college. An Atlanta...