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Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America. By Donald Katz. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992. xvi, 613 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-06-019009-4.)
Home Fires is a superb model for the new narrative history. Donald Katz, a journalist, provides a highly readable family saga ranging from 1945 to the present, based on extensive interviews with members of the extended Gordon family and their associates. Katz does not let his voice or perspective intrude; and everyone gets a fair, objective, and empathetic hearing, even on sensitive subjects like women's issues, homosexuality, and drug abuse. The truth of history and sociology as actually lived becomes more compelling than fiction.
Katz follows the Goldenbergs from their marriage during World War II; the move from the Bronx to the "American Dream" in a new Long Island suburb--when their name changed to Gordon; the rearing of four children; the development of family...