Download Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America AudioBook Free
Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family - real people, brands unchanged. Spanning almost five years, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their account has the scope, depth, riches of occurrence, and emotional intensity of the great book, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and stress - the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar time, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound social changes. Donald Katz begins his bank account in 1945, when Sam Gordon comes home from the warfare to his young partner, Eve, and their two-year-old, Susan, eager to move his family in to the growing middle class. After a few years in the Bronx, Sam and Eve proceed to a fresh Long Island subdivision and have two more children. As the '50s yield to the '60s, younger Gordons fly away in to the culture like shrapnel from an artillery shell, each tracing a distinctive trajectory: Susan, early into rock and roll 'n' spin and civil protection under the law, Vassar female, feminist, author of "The Politics of Orgasm", and recovering medication addict; Lorraine, teenage beatnik and leftie, one-time member of a women's rock band, longtime follower of the Indian religious tutor; Sheila, the "good" little princess who committed then remarried, with a major suburban house, two kids, and a therapist; and Ricky, the youngest, see to the family traumas and reason behind a few himself, openly gay, eclectically MODERN, and a successful songwriter and composer. And everything Sam and Eve ever required - like millions of others who possessed experienced the Depressive disorder and the warfare - was a "normal family". Katz tells the Gordons' account - the unraveling of Sam's and Eve's American fantasy, to the gradual, hopeful reknitting of the family - marshaling a brilliant cast of supporting characters. Deftly juxtaposing day-to-day family life with landmark open public events, Katz creates a wealthy and revealing portrait of the second 50 percent of the 20th hundred years in America.
