A Long Way from Home

October 28, 2002
"For as long as I or anyone in my family can remember, I have been a chatterbox, someone with a verbal facility and an eager attitude about exercising it," writes news anchor Brokaw in this follow-up to An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation. The author's tendency to fill space with words comes across loud and clear in these pages, as the book is essentially a soup to nuts oral history of an all-American kid's years growing up in the Midwest. Brokaw was born in 1940 in Webster, S.Dak., and lived in the area for the first 22 years of his life. The son of upstanding farmers who lived by the motto of "waste not, want not," Brokaw had a squeaky-clean childhood and adolescence, ruled by work, sports and family. His memoir reflects that straight-arrowed monotony, with chapters entitled "Games," "Boom Time" and "On the Air." And although the prose and subject matter are largely dry and mundane, Brokaw does occasionally reflect on the bigger picture, recalling, for example, that while he was going to high school basketball games, Rosa Parks's bus boycott was making history hundreds of miles away. His sweet recollections of his early journalism career—he got his start volunteering at a small radio station—will probably interest nostalgic readers more than young journalists. Peppered with photographs of "Mother and Dad helping out at Yankton's Teen Canteen, 1958" and other similar images, this tribute to an idyllic childhood should please Brokaw's loyal fans. Photos. (Nov. 5)Forecast:Ubiquitous media will get Brokaw's book going, and holiday sales should be strong.

July 15, 2002
Brokaw reports on himself.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2002
"For whatever reason," says the anchor of "NBC Nightly News" and author of three previous best-sellers, "I've always been hardwired for memory: I can see clearly in my mind's eye events from very early in my life." With the eloquent plainspokenness of his "people"--South Dakotans, that is--Brokaw recalls his early life up to the age of 22, when he "put [his] home state of South Dakota in a rearview mirror and drove away." All stories about growing up are the same, yet, at the same time, they are all different. And the tales of parents and grandparents, girls and sports, that Brokaw relates here resonate with universality yet speak to his ability to express his own take on things. His book is no featherweight trip down nostalgia lane but, instead, an honest, moving testimony to the values and virtues instilled in someone growing up in the heartland in the 1940s and 1950s and to the veracity of the maxim that you can't go home again, but you always take a piece of home with you when you leave. Expect this to hit the best-seller lists. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)