Blue Sky Dream
A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, award-winner David Beers offers a powerful, personal vision of the rise and fall of the American middle class. Here is a dazzling literary chronicle of a family, a people, and a nation: the “blue sky tribe” of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone. Blue Sky Dream is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of seeing the recent past with stunning clarity. David Beers explores issues that define our times—downsizing, middle-class anxiety, the profound anger with government, the sense that something has gone awry with the United States—with such skill, personal immediacy, and compassion that readers will see their own histories in his prose. Blue Sky Dream can rightly be called a communal memoir, because in telling his family’s tale—growing tensions and disillusionment in their suburban paradise, a son rejecting his parents’ values, one sudden and inexplicable moment of violence—Beers tells the story of his people, the blue sky tribe “who imagined ourselves to be living the inevitable future, and are very surprised today to discover we were but a strange and aberrant moment that is now receding into history.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beers's poignant, eloquent autobiographical memoir of growing up in Silicon Valley during the 1960s is a stunning eulogy for the middle-class American Dream. His father, Hal, a Lockheed engineer and former navy jet pilot, worked on secret projects designing spy satellites. His mother, Terry, a devout, mystical Catholic often at odds with her scientifically minded, Protestant husband, raised four children in their suburban tract home and "assumed the task of making us not merely Catholic, but Irish Catholic.... In inventing an ethnicity for us, she selected only Irish positives, giving us to understand that we were genetically impish and fun-loving." Beers's parents adopted the widespread faith that America's technological superiority would ensure limitless prosperity, but disillusionment set in as Hal grew disenchanted with a corporate culture of compartmentalization. As a muckraking Mother Jones editor, Beers critiqued the military-industrial complex that assured his father's livelihood. His incisive takes on suburbia, the ever-present seductions of television, Reagan's reinvigoration of the Cold War, Clinton's alleged reneging on the "peace dividend" and the downsizing of corporate America make this a memorable document. Beers is now a freelance journalist based in Vancouver. Photos. First serial to New York Times Magazine; film rights sold to Kennedy-Marshall/Paramount; author tour.
