Blue Sky Dream

Starred review from July 29, 1996
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.

November 1, 1995
When Harper's published Beers's essay on growing up in 1950s middle-class America, a lot of good things started happening. Not only did the essay win the National Magazine Award, but book rights were sold to Doubleday in a heated auction and movie rights were sold to Paramount.

Starred review from September 1, 1996
How did American culture, once the province of rugged individuals, become corporate? Award-winning journalist Beers offers some provocative theories in his illuminating "communal memoir." By chronicling his father's experiences in the aerospace industry during the late 1950s and 1960s, Beers, in a brilliant extrapolation of the cultural from the personal, reveals the mindset that gave rise to the world-changing military-industrial complex and the space race. The obsession with rockets, missiles, and the domination of space is the "blue sky dream," and the men who devoted themselves to it (aerospace engineers at Lockheed, for example) became, in Beers' powerfully metaphorical lexicon, the "blue sky tribe." Their patriarch was Wernher von Braun, whose vision, Beers believes, led to a mania for order and conformity that manifested itself in suburbs, industrial parks, and shopping malls, an environment exemplified by Silicon Valley. As Beers explores all the ramifications of these trends (often going off in unexpected directions), he compares the corporate "dream" with the realities of racism, inner city poverty, the war in Vietnam, and the travesties of the Reagan years. Intelligently conceived, highly original, and beautifully executed. ((Reviewed Sept. 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)

September 15, 1997
California's aerospace industry crashes along with the American dream, taking anxious and angry suburban denizens along with it.

September 1, 1996
Freelance writer Beers offers a memoir of the baby boom generation that takes its place alongside such memoirs as Lawrence Wright's In the New World (Knopf, 1987). Born in the late 1950s, Beers, whose father worked for over 30 years as an engineer for Lockheed, finds his own life and that of his parents a poignant symbol for the course of America during the same period. From his father's career in the aerospace industry, which spanned the boom times of the Cold War and the downsizing of the post-Cold War present, to his mother's deeply rooted Roman Catholic faith, which the author finds himself unable to accept, his use of his own life experiences as a symbol for larger social change works well. The book thus takes its place with the memoirs of Wright and others as an important (and highly readable) social history document of the period. Highly recommended for all types of readers.--Scott K. Wright, Univ. of St. Thomas, St. Paul