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

Sam Gordon, an electrician, comes from World War II to his young wife, Eve, and their baby daughter, Susan, eager to move his family into the burgeoning middle class and the good life that beckons idyllically all around them. As the years pass, Sam and Eve move to a Long Island suburb, become the first on their block to own a TV and an automobile, and have three more children, who, along with Susan, will grow up to shatter their American Dream. This is a chronicle of the cultural transformations of post-war America as reflected in the experience of the Gordons - real people, names unchanged: Sam and Eve, now retired in Miami; Susan, Vassar girl, into civil rights, pot, early feminism and author of "The Politics of Orgasm", a longtime junkie, she is now recovering in a 12-step programme; Lorraine, teenage beatnik and currently living on an ashram; Sheila, the cheerleader who married the football hero and now has a suburban house, with two kids and a shrink; and Ricky, the youngest, witness to the family traumas and openly gay, a walking directory of the New Age. Day-to-day family life is juxtaposed with landmark public events to create a narrative tapestry which is a portrait of America in the last 50 years.

In this moving, perceptive social history, nominated for the NBCC award for general nonfiction, Katz follows the lives of the Gordon family from 1945, when they moved to suburban Long Island, to the year 1990, tracing the changes of four decades.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.