Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America

(Paperback, Revised Edition)

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"Home Fires" is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. In the hands of Donald Katz, it is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, brilliantly illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes. Katz begins his account in 1945, when Sam Gordon, an electrician, comes home from the war to his young wife, Eve, and their two-year-old daughter, Susan, eager to move his family into the growing middle class and the good life that beckons all around them. After a few years of apartment life in the Bronx, where they have another little girl and become the first on their block to own a TV, Sam and Eve move to a new Long Island subdivision and have two more children. As the fifties yield to the sixties, the younger Gordons begin to fly out and away into the culture like shrapnel from an artillery shell, each tracing a unique trajectory: Susan, early into rock 'n' roll and civil rights, Vassar girl, pioneer feminist, author of "The Politics of Orgasm," and recovering drug addict; Lorraine, teenage beatnik and young leftie, one-time member of a women's rock band, longtime follower of Indian religious teacher Swami Satchidananda; Sheila, the "good" daughter who married the high school heartthrob, then remarried, with a big suburban house, two kids, a therapist, and a budding career as a painter; and Ricky, the youngest, witness to the family traumas and cause of a few himself, openly gay, eclectically New Age, and a successful songwriter and composer.

Reviews

"Home Fires became my favorite book, one of those seminal pieces of literature that shaped my identity and made me want to be a writer ... what makes [it] stand out is the masterful way that Mr. Katz weaves together the family's history with the history of the time ... [plus], it's a hell of a story." -- New York Observer

Author Bio

Donald Katz is founder and CEO of Audible, Inc., the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet. Prior to founding Audible, Katz was a journalist and author for twenty years; his work won a National Magazine Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other prizes. Katz graduated from New York University in 1974, where he studied with novelist Ralph Ellison. Mr. Katz is married, the father of three children, and an avid ice hockey player. Jonathan Alter is an author, journalist,and television commentator. Since 1983, he has been a correspondent and columnist for Newsweek. He is also an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, where he appears three or four times a week. Alter is the author of The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, a national bestseller, and The Promise: President Obama, Year One, which went to number four on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the one hundred "Notable Books of the Year" by the Times. He is also the author of Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, Media and Culture, a collection of his Newsweek columns. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey with his wife, Emily Lazar, a producer for The Colbert Report, and their three children, Charlotte, Tommy and Molly.