Godges comes to the task with training in journalism and in American history and he puts those skills to use in this well-researched story. And lost those ordinary stories certainly are without someone like Mr Godges to record them. I only wish someone in my family had written such a book before our family's stories were lost to time.

I can imagine this book being a wonderful supplement to a textbook in a high school American history class. Godges' family, but also a remarkably sensitive and intuitive history of the ordinary American in the twentieth century. Read a free excerpt (Chapter One) either here on the author page or at Wow! This sprawling book is a love letter to Mr. This true story is an engrossing portrait of an American family and an evocative documentation of nearly 100 years of American history. In an era of bitter cultural polarization, Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century celebrates what has kept America together.

Marine Corps father, an emotionally effusive Italian mother, an Oliver North son, a Hillary Clinton daughter, a mentally ill sister, a jock brother, a lesbian rocker, and a gay male activist. From these dissimilar backgrounds emerges a quintessential American family, one whose members embody the conflicting social movements of their times: a staunchly Catholic Polish immigrant U.S. A broken Polish immigrant family leaves a legacy of heartbreak, separation, Civilian Conservation Corps redemption, and World War II heroism. An extended Italian immigrant family clings to community life amid tragedy, the Spanish flu, Prohibition, and the Great Depression.

Oh, Beautiful by John Paul Godges