Home Fires an Intimate Portrait of One

Katz, Donald

Harpercollins Publisher

An intimate portrait of one middle-class family in postwar American.

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

Politics & Social Sciences

Katz, Donald R.

Social Sciences

Perennial

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, eager to move his family into the growing middle class and the good life that beckons all around them. 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. Katz charts the unraveling of Sam's and Eve's American Dream, to the slow, hopeful reknitting of the family. Deftly juxtaposing day-to-day family life with landmark public events, Katz creates a rich and revealing portrait of the second half of the twentieth century in America.

Home Fires

Random House Value Publishing

Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World

The author of Home Fires presents a whimsical look at the Nike Corporation, its goals, business operations, image, influence, and global implications. 40,000 first printing. Tour.

Business & Money

Random House]

The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories collects journalist Donald Katz's most fascinating profiles of people whose lives tell us something about business, adventure, sports, politics, culture, and in a brilliant, ancillary way, ourselves. Katz's opening story and the title piece of the book offers a hilarious yet appropriately reverential look at 72-year old Reg Mellor, unparalleled "ferret legging" champion of Yorkshire and the world. Other characters who populate this book include fitness guru Jack LaLanne, legendary entrepreneur Paul Hawken, and master political cartoonist and inspired troublemaker Bill Mauldin. While this collection contains portraits that are varied in scene and tone, their depictions of obsession, delusion, perseverance, creativity, and good-heartedness-the list could go on and on-remain a constant. Each of these stories conveys a sense of the strangeness, wonder, and oddity of life-a theme that provides a gravitational center to this multifarious selection drawn from twenty years of an award-winning non-fiction story-teller's body of work.

The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

AtRandom

Few writers can match journalist Donald Katz’s ability to make an exotic locale familiar or transform an ordinary place into something peculiar if not completely weird. The Valley of the Fallen and Other Places gathers a pastiche of stories from around the world, each of which subtly underlines the relationship between geography and politics. Locations, counties, regions of the world emerge as characters in Katz’s panoramic cast–as fully drawn as the unusual people that occupy them–so that one realizes of each particular account, that this could only happen in a place like this. The setting for each of these pieces–whether home or abroad–provides a resonant backdrop for Katz’s startling perceptions and cultural acumen. He paints a portrait of Spain in which people are dying of political repression and vividly depicts Italy in the throes of a postwar capitalist hangover. Katz describes Arkansas, its history of racial strife notwithstanding, as an “American cultural ark” where respect for old-fashioned gumption and the tolerance for human eccentricity have fostered a renaissance of spirit. He captures the poignant ruin of political ideals gone amuck in the image of columns of Ethiopian children being herded through the night at gunpoint, undergoing political re-education. Katz’s observations of the Sinai, where “beliefs, convictions, even hunches become howling zeal,” contrast with Santa Fe’s “philosophical cogitating and quality-of-life improvement projects” in a New Age mecca that breeds tamer but equally fervent faiths. The cumulative effect of reading this eclectic collection is one of wonder about the mysterious and dazzling world in which we live, and the way our lives are shaped by our place in it.

The Valley of the Fallen: And Other Places

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, eager to move his family into the growing middle class and the good life that beckons all around them. 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. Katz charts the unraveling of Sam's and Eve's American Dream, to the slow, hopeful reknitting of the family. Deftly juxtaposing day-to-day family life with landmark public events, Katz creates a rich and revealing portrait of the second half of the twentieth century in America.

Biographies & Memoirs

Rare Bird Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Katz, Donald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Katz, Donald

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Katz, Donald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Home Fires an Intimate Portrait of One

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

Home Fires

Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World

The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories

The Valley of the Fallen: And Other Places

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