A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland Book

"Tell me where you come from and I will tell you what you are." Saul Bellow

This is the theme of the book. Tom Brokaw looks at his youth in South Dakota in the 1940s and 50s.

Brokaw is today a well-known television journalist. He has been the managing editor and anchor for NBC Nightly News for twenty-two years. In this book he writes not only of his own youth, but also of his parents and grandparents. Each generation influences the next. He writes of life on the Great Plains, the work ethic and the moral code by which he was raised. He was born in 1940 in Webster, South Dakota. We follow him through to the early 1960s. In 1962 he married Meredith Lynn Auld, a girl he had had his eye on for many a year. After their marriage they move east, but their upbringing on the Great Plains shaped them forever.

"All regions and all eras influence those who live in them."

This is a line taken from the book.

While the book is about Brokaw, it will also speak to those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in the Midwest.

Brokaw's prose is simple and clear. Historical events are woven in, but not excessively. He speaks of political and historical events that came to influence him. He speaks of race and women's rights. His mother was strong-willed and all three of her sons were raised to know how to cook, clean, iron and do all those chores often relegated to women.

In closing, when he moves East, he says:

"We managed to keep our bearings because of the way and the place in which we had been raised. Since that muggy night in August 1962 we have come to many more bridges into the unknown and we have learned that crossing them is almost always more rewarding than staying on the familiar side of the river."

I like Brokaw's prose and easily relate to what he says.

Don Cashman narrates the audiobook. He does a marvelous job. He reads slowly and clearly, exactly how I like a book to be read. I have given the narration performance five stars. I cannot help but wonder why though Brokaw has not chosen to read the audiobook himself.

I definitely recommend this book, not only to learn about Brokaw but also because how he was raised will speak to readers of his generation. I have no real complaints, only that perhaps it could have gone further. How it was to acclimatize to the NYC scene is not covered.