Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace

David Beers

Mey 2012 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Doubleday

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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.”

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David Beers won the National Magazine Award in 1993 for his essay “The Crash of Blue Sky California,” which appeared in Harper’s.  He is a former editor of the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday Magazine and Mother Jones; his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Nation, and many other publications.  He now lives in Vancouver with his wife, Deirdre, and their daughter, Nora.