In Blue Sky Dream, 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. This is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of seeing the recent past with stunning clarity. 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."...