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

An account of one family's experiences in postwar America chronicles their cultural transformation through a flight to suburbia, materialism, and the sixties counterculture, describing where they are today

In 1945 Samuel Gordon, an electrician, returned home to the Bronx in New York City after the close of World War II and began his search for the American dream by moving with his wife Eve and daughter Susan to suburban Long Island. In this moving, perceptive social history, Katz ( The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears ) traces the lives of the Gordon family, which swelled to include two more daughters and a son, to the year 1990, revisiting the cultural changes of four decades. The Gordon children, to their parents' occasional distress and bewilderment, flirted with political activism and addictive drugs, knew both marriage and divorce and found New Age religion. Their son Ricky "came out"--happily gay. Katz's objective yet compassionate approach to their story makes riveting reading and fosters the conclusion that upheaval and trauma are as integral to families as love. 50,000 first printing; $65,000 ad/promo; first serial to Esquire; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An in-depth personal/sociological/cultural saga of one US family, 1945-90. Beginning with Sam Gordon's 1945 return from WW II to his wife and two-year-old daughter in Brooklyn, Katz (The Big Store, winner of the 1988 Heartland Prize for nonfiction) tells the life story of the Gordons and their three daughters and son. Integral to Katz's narrative are the social trends, generational perspectives, movies, books, and music that shape and texture the Gordons' lives. Thus in the Fifties, the Gordons live by the widely touted ideal of ``togetherness,'' all sitting down after dinner to an evening of TV. By the late Sixties, though, when the daughters have their own families, psychological pundits have declared that the nuclear family's rigid togetherness breeds psychoses and emotional damage. Sam Gordon, the personification of American blue-collar, work-hard-and-better-your-lot ethic, is bewildered when his daughter moves into the East Village squalor of his childhood, and disappointed in his only son, who grows up to be a gay art-song composer (though Ricky eventually becomes the apple of Sam's eye). Susan, born in 1943, enjoys the most dramatic story. Winning a scholarship to Vassar, she becomes a successful writer--covering the 1967 ``First Human Be-in'' in Golden Gate Park for Newsweek, and receiving a $10,000 advance from Random House for a pre-Kate Millett feminist analysis of sex. By 1987, though, she's a junkie living on the street. The trouble with Katz's account is that, despite its immense detail and careful meshing of familial foreground and social background, it sometimes seems historical and cold, with the cultural artifacts surrounding the Gordons often the most typical and obvious ones of years past. Of interest but not quite a match for William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream (1974), the brilliant cultural history to which Katz's book, with its twist of family overlay, owes much. (Sixteen-page b&w photo insert--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Using the true story of a typical American family to encapsulate major social, cultural, and political developments in the United States from the end of World War II until 1991 appeals as an idea but suffers here in execution. Esquire columnist Katz ( The Big Store , LJ 10/15/87) deals only patchily with the larger forces at work in America's evolution over a half-century. It could be argued that the experiences of a Jewish family from New York City and suburban Long Island are hardly typical of all the nation's families, but in any case the relentless pursuit of the Gordons' story--year after year, for 600 pages of flat, semifictionalized prose--becomes tedious long before the book's close. This hybrid brings out the weaknesses rather than the strengths of its elements. Not recommended. First serial to Esquire ; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/92.
- Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.