Flyover Country: Baby Boomers and Their Stories

by Christopher Harper

Overview

Flyover Country focuses on a group of baby boomers who graduated from high school in 1969 in the Midwest before setting off into the world in a time of turbulence to fight in Vietnam, to protest against that war, to find jobs, to have families, and to live lives throughout the United States and overseas. Many of these people have made significant contributions to their communities as business owners, doctors, lawyers, ministers, politicians, and teachers. Many have suffered through tough times, losing their way due to alcohol or drugs or facing family crises from divorce to the death of a spouse or a child. The story also is Harper's story. It is the story of a kid from flyover country who used what he learned in the Midwest to travel throughout the world as a journalist and then as a college professor to try to teach those lessons to his students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761853336
Publisher:	Hamilton Books
Publication date:	12/02/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	150
File size:	753 KB

About the Author

Christopher Harper is an associate professor of journalism at Temple University. He worked as a reporter for more than twenty years for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and ABC News in more than fifty countries. He lives in Moravia, New York, with his wife, Elizabeth, and his daughter, Cecylia.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Chapter One: Growing Up
Chapter 3 Chapter Two: Glory Days?
Chapter 4 Chapter Three: Moving On
Chapter 5 Chapter Four: Working
Chapter 6 Chapter Five: Family
Chapter 7 Chapter Six: Hard Times
Chapter 8 Chapter Seven: Believing
Chapter 9 Chapter Eight: The Class of 2009
Chapter 10 Chapter Nine: Reflections from Forty Years Ago and Forty Years Apart
Chapter 11 Chapter Ten: One More Time with Feeling
Chapter 12 Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

…Harper combines the eye of a foreign correspondent with the heart of a poet. He says important things about American culture, about the heartland versus the coasts, about the allure of nostalgia, about the importance of high school as a time of life that shapes us, about the baby boomer experience, about family, and about the pathos of aging. I loved the book.

Barry Strauss

…In Flyover Country you'll meet the dreamers, poets, stoners, jocks, cheerleaders, and anonymous faces that were part of the Class of '69. Then, you'll meet them again, as they are today. Travel the hard road with Harper as the lessons of high school teach him to walk in the deepest black forests.

Ken Mills

The impressions of Chris Harper's classmates, mixed with his own….are assembled masterfully to provide us with a revealing picture of Americans living in what the author calls flyover country in two turbulent times —- the 1960s and today.

Steven Seidman

A candid, collective portrait of the highs and lows of daily life, Flyover Country seeks to impart invaluable lessons to future generations, and is highly recommended especially for public library collections.

Midwest Book Review

A candid, collective portrait of the highs and lows of daily life, Flyover Country seeks to impart invaluable lessons to future generations, and is highly recommended especially for public library collections.

The Midwest Book Review