Our Family Dreams - Tapa dura

"Superb...Smith goes beyond A-Z to enfold us within the saga of a family at home in The New World since 1630...a page turner." --Rita Kohn, NUVO, Indianapolis "Compelling....Smith brings his subjects to life with their own words and images." --Library Journal "[A]masterful and vivid retelling...Smith draws the reader into the family's aspirations and fears in a way that emphasizes their similarities to the hopes and dreams of families today." --Booklist "[A] vividly detailed history... Incomparable sources make for an unusually intimate American portrait." --Kirkus Reviews "A deeply moving story about Americans on the move, searching at once for home and for advancement. Daniel Blake Smith understands that this drama was central in the nineteenth century and that it is still with us. He brings a historian's knowledge of regional subcultures and a novelist's sense of human drama to the Fletcher family's diaries and letters." --David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of Runaway America and Slavery's Constitution "Our Family Dreams is full and thick storytelling. The book takes two brothers and patriarchs named Fletcher across the country and through the 1800s as they swerve from peasantry to property, slavery to abolition, Massachusetts, to Virginia, to Indiana, Yankee to Confederate, and Yale to Sweet Briar. In their poignant letters, the reader hears a family hope, chat, complain, scold, and weep. A journey of many paths, and much pleasure." --Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family "Our Family Dreams captures the intimate lives of the Fletcher family during the Civil War era, when the national conflict sundered the family. Their letters and diaries recount not only great events but also day-to-day tales of family life. Love, death, the strife among parents and children--the eternal elements of comedy and tragedy--all emerge vividly in these pages." --Henry Wiencek, author of The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography. "This is an important--even a crucial--book. It convincingly dramatizes one of the most important and least understood factors in the American experience--the power of family in shaping a man or woman's life. Anyone who reads Our Family Dreams will come away deeply moved and more than a little wiser." --Thomas Fleming, author of The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers "Like figures in a fairy tale, the Fletcher children of Our Family Dreams leave home with little; the account of how they scramble to achieve in early America reveals drama and conflict that will appeal strongly to readers of novels, as well as nonfiction. Take the internal shocks of the well-educated Elijah, who moves south and is tugged by opposing forces--sympathy versus disdain for slaves, shock versus respect for masters, respect for the morality of his devout Vermont parents versus love for a charming plantation heiress..." --Marly Youmans, award-winning author of Maze of Blood and The Wolf Pit "Ambition animates Daniel Blake Smith's sweeping account of a nineteenth-century American family, but the genius of Our Family Dreams turns on the inner doubts and unfulfilled visions that decorate the Fletchers' as well as our own 'American Dream'--in ways readers will find at once eerily familiar and utterly astounding." --Emily Bingham, author of Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham

In the early years after the Revolution, Americans were on the move, seeking to establish a new way of life. And, more than the church or the school or the courthouse, it was the family that nurtured the American Dream. In this novel-like narrative, Daniel Blake Smith vividly brings to life the Fletchers, a family of loving, ambitious, at times insecure pioneers who scattered across the vast expanse of post-revolutionary America but kept in touch through letters despite their wildly different life paths. On a hard scrabble farm in Vermont, the patriarch, Jesse Fletcher, struggled with debt and depression but managed to educate his children, especially his son Elijah, a Yankee who moved to Virginia, shocked by the horrors of slavery but then seduced by the plantation lifestyle. Another son, Calvin, left at age 17 for Indianapolis to become a self-made lawyer, banker, and a prominent citizen and passionate abolitionist. The grandchildren include Indiana, a women's education activist who donated her home to create Sweet Briar College; black sheep Lucian, who went to California to join in the gold rush; and physician Billy captured as a spy during the Civil War. Through letters and diaries, we find in Our Family Dreams that the Fletchers appear surprisingly similar to us; they dream, fret, fight, and love. Despite numerous heartaches and setbacks, their spirit of enterprise, sacrifice, mobility, and education endures as American values to this day.