Long Way From Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland - Hardcover

In his earlier books, TV news anchor Tom Brokaw has leaned heavily on the experiences of others to remember and define what he calls "the Greatest Generation"--those who came of age during World War II and its aftermath. In A Long Way Home Brokaw turns inward to focus on his own experiences growing up in South Dakota, his early years a broadcaster working in a then-novel medium, and his still-deep connection to the Midwestern people, places, and values that shaped him. In this bluntly effective and homespun memoir, Brokaw argues that, no matter how far one may travel--say, to New York and through five decades of a successful broadcast journalism career--it's possible to remain a true creature of the heartlands. It's a message that is likely to resonate most emphatically with those of Brokaw's generation, though its basic premise can be applied more universally as well. --David Bombeck

In A Long Way from Home, Tom Brokaw describes his childhood and youth in South Dakota, and the people and places in the American heartland of the 1940s and 1950s that continue to shape his life today. As he reflects on the American experience as he lived and observed it during the central decades of the twentieth century, Brokaw writes of his parents' lives during the Great Depression, his boyhood along the Missouri River, the happy days of his adolescence in Yankton, and his early years in broadcast journalism on the cusp of the turbulent 1960s. As he recounts his own American pilgrimage, Tom Brokaw also explores what brought him and so many Americans to lead lives a long way from home, yet forever affected by it.