A Long Way From Home: Growing Up In The American Heartland

Reflections on America and the American experience as he has lived and observed it, by the bestselling author of The Greatest Generation.

'In this beautiful memoir, Tom Brokaw writes of America and of the American experience. From his parents life in theThirties, on to his boyhood along the Missouri River and on the prairies of South Dakota in the Forties, into his early journalism career in the Fifties and the tumultuous Sixties, up to the present, this personal story is a reflection on America in our time. Tom Brokaw writes about growing up and coming of age in the heartland, and of the family, the people, the culture and the values that shaped him then and still do today. His father, Red Brokaw, a genius with machines, followed the instincts of Tom's mother Jean, and took the risk of moving his small family from an Army base to Pickstown, South Dakota, where Red got a job as a heavy equipment operator in the Army Corps of Engineers' project building the Ft. Randall dam...

Book Magazine

The recent resignation of saccharine author and onetime syndicated columnist Bob Greene over sexual misconduct allegations apparently left a slot open for feel-good narratives from the heartland, a slot that South Dakota native and "greatest generation" chronicler Brokaw fills all too well. Being raised on windswept plains among hardscrabble immigrant farmers left quite an impression on the future news anchor, and it's in his descriptions of this place that the book comes alive. By comparison, Brokaw's insights into how the landscape informed his childhood and early adulthood are far less interesting. It's all too easy to imagine these sections as the script for an NBC news special; its rosy generalizations—"I learned a lot about baseball, friendship and life during those summers"—are the stuff of TelePrompters.

Author : Tom Brokaw

Publisher : Random House

Published Year : 2002

Edition : 1

Format : Hardcover, 233 pages

Dimensions : 6.35 (w) x 9.52 (h) x 1.11 (d)

ISBN : 0375507639

ISBN13 : 9780375507632

Overview :

In this beautiful memoir, Tom Brokaw writes of America and of the American experience. From his parents’ life in theThirties, on to his boyhood along the Missouri River and on the prairies of South Dakota in the Forties, into his early journalism career in the Fifties and the tumultuous Sixties, up to the present, this personal story is a reflection on America in our time. Tom Brokaw writes about growing up and coming of age in the heartland, and of the family, the people, the culture and the values that shaped him then and still do today. His father, Red Brokaw, a genius with machines, followed the instincts of Tom's mother Jean, and took the risk of moving his small family from an Army base to Pickstown, South Dakota, where Red got a job as a heavy equipment operator in the Army Corps of Engineers' project building the Ft. Randall dam along the Missouri River. Tom Brokaw describes how this move became the pivotal decision in their lives, as the Brokaw family, along with others after World War II, began to live out the American Dream: community, relative prosperity, middle class pleasures and good educations for their children. "Along the river and in the surrounding hills, I had a Tom Sawyer boyhood," Brokaw writes; and as he describes his own pilgrimage as it unfolded–from childhood to love, marriage, the early days in broadcast journalism, and beyond–he also reflects on what brought him and so many Americans of his generation to lead lives a long way from home, yet forever affected by it.