Hey, Greatest Generation, it's on.

The generation born from 1901 to 1924, those who scraped by during the Depression, fought World War II and tended victory gardens at home, the folks who toiled for the country's largest economic boom now find themselves in the golden years with a new reason to put up their dukes.

It's a title fight for the "greatest" honor.

They've got it. Their kids want it.

It's the "Greatest Generation" versus their offspring, the baby boomers, born from 1946 to 1964.

Tom Brokaw set up this epic battle when he coined the phrase in his 1998 book.

"The Greatest Generation," an homage in itself, almost begged for challenge.

Now it has one.

Leonard Steinhorn, a 50-year-old professor at American University in Washington, has written "The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy" (Thomas Dunne, $24.95).

His book, not an attack on the Greatest Generation so much as a defense of his own, attempts to dispel the myth of the boomers as SUV-piloting materialists, drunk on half-caf lattes and their own wealth.

Steinhorn says he's not trying to pit the flower children against the GIs. He's grateful for the contributions of his parents' generation. But give some credit to the kids, already.

"The stereotype of boomers as narcissistic or self-involved, it led us to ignore how society has so fundamentally changed and improved in the baby-boom era," he says.

"There's nothing epic or Homeric about changing the environment or cleaning up a stream, nothing epic or Homeric about effecting equality at home or ... ending the shame minorities have felt for so many decades in this country for simply sounding or looking different.

"These are so rarely captured, but they're as important and significant as any war has been, but they get right to the heart of what we want and who we are."

When remembering, Steinhorn notes, both generations focus on the most dramatic moments: The battlefields of World War II, the jungles of Vietnam and the protests at home.

But quieter decades passed.

"It was a time when women were told to stay home, blacks and minorities were told to stay separate, Jews and religious minorities were told to be inconspicuous, gay people were told to hate themselves and stay in the closet. ... Anyone who marched to a different drum or pursued personal freedoms, they were pretty much told to stay silent," Steinhorn said.

"We are the generation that has proved to many: We cannot have it all at once."