"Sputnik was my lucky star," writes David Beers, a telegraphic way of saying that for his family, and for millions like them, the Cold War space race assured a comfortable existence in a sunny subdivision, with all the neatly trimmed lawns surrounding modern tract houses and a shiny new patriotic mythology created to sustain the new, technocratic middle class at the dawn of the 1960s. His father built space weapons in secret for Lockheed. His mother constructed Catholicism in a brand new home. His school and church and television set all assured that he belonged to a chosen people, a "blue sky tribe" showing the rest of America the way to the future.

This is a highly personal remembrance of a rather ordinary family; one that today seems not to have heralded the future, but to have lived within an artificial bubble that has burst.

This is also a communal memoir, a weaving in of the people (from Wernher von Braun to June Lockhart to Steve Wozniak) and events (from Sputnik to Vietnam to Star Wars) that bind the tribe's imagination.

One strand running throughout Blue Sky Dream follows the rise of aerospace as it surpasses the auto industry in employment, becomes an icon of national prestige, founders on the moral crisis of Vietnam, and bleeds millions of disillusioned workers in the layoffs of the 1990s. Another thread follows the rooting of the Church in suburbia, a Catholicism that embraced the space-age optimism of the 1960s and now asks faith of a generation that prefers a stance of jaded irony.

Blows to faith suffered by the blue sky tribe are a steadily recurring theme in this memoir: faith in the benevolent corporation; faith in government-led technology; faith in an ever-expanding middle class. Sometimes, as the author recounts, the blows have been all too real. On a hot summer night at the height of the Vietnam war, pent-up tensions overflow and the tract home backyard becomes the scene of an unexpected nasty beating. Like a zoom lens, the author shifts between the intimacy of family life and the broader social forces at work on that family, tracking his story through to present day. Anyone with a connection to American suburbia during the Cold War will find here something of their own story, as well.