Writing
Don was an award-winning journalist and author for 20 years. Here is some of his work.
Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America
Performed by Joe Barrett;
introduction by Jonathan Alter;
afterword by Ricky Ian Gordon
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Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family—real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma—the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.
Don begins his account in 1945, when Sam Gordon comes home from the war to his young wife, Eve, and their two-year-old, Susan, eager to move his family into the growing middle class. After a few years in the Bronx, Sam and Eve move to a new Long Island subdivision and have two more children. As the ’50s yield to the ’60s, the younger Gordons fly out into the culture like shrapnel from an artillery shell, each tracing a unique trajectory: Susan, early into rock ‘n’ roll and civil rights, Vassar girl, feminist, author of “The Politics of Orgasm”, and recovering drug addict; Lorraine, teenage beatnik and leftie, one-time member of a women’s rock band, longtime follower of an Indian religious teacher; Sheila, the “good” daughter who married then remarried, with a big suburban house, two kids, and a therapist; and Ricky, the youngest, witness to the family traumas and cause of a few himself, openly gay, eclectically New Age, and a successful songwriter and composer. And all Sam and Eve ever wanted—like millions of others who had experienced the Depression and the war—was a “normal family”.
Don tells the Gordons’ story—the unraveling of Sam’s and Eve’s American dream, to the slow, hopeful reknitting of the family—marshaling a vivid cast of supporting characters. Deftly juxtaposing day-to-day family life with landmark public events, Don creates a rich and revealing portrait of the second half of the 20th century in America.
All proceeds from the sale of the Audible and eBook editions of Home Fires will go to the Audible Scholars Program, which has provided internships and financial support to Newark students since 1997.
The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears
Performed by Brian Sutherland
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In 1972, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. was America's greatest store, accounting for over 1 percent of the gross national product. Suddenly, profits plummeted and the stock price collapsed. Sears was at civil war and in need of a new leader. In 1978, Edward R. Telling became the Sears chairman, and by 1984 Sears was back on top, bigger than ever. Telling turned things around so dramatically it seemed like a miracle. But the resurrection of Sears as a great American merchant was no miracle, but the result of the power, vision, and will of strong leadership.
Award-winning author Donald Katz, who received unprecedented and unrestricted access to Sears's records, meetings, and executives, delivers a spellbinding account that gives you a front-row seat to a corporate revolution. Katz is the founder and CEO of Audible, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment.
Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World
Performed by Brian Sutherland
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The protagonist of Just Do It is Phil Knight, a reclusive billionaire who started a two-man operation importing Japanese running shoes and built it into a $4 billion company. Irreverent, unpredictable, and leery of the sports establishment, Knight created the most muscular jock culture in business, a place where employees routinely took two hours at lunch to work out and then strategized late into the night in their holy war against competitors Reebok and Adidas. To outsiders, Nike was a cult. Insiders believed they were furthering the company's mission: to improve the performance of serious athletes.
Not everyone could be a Nike guy. It required a certain attitude. For example: Michael Jordan refusing to wear Reebok at the 1992 Olympics, or Charles Barkley joking about becoming a porn star. In Just Do It, award-winning author Donald Katz shows how Nike created the spectacular imagery and marketing campaigns that made Jordan, Barkley, and Bo Jackson international icons. He also documented Nike's increasingly influential role in the management of its high-priced talent, taking us inside lucrative endorsement deals involving Jim Courier, Andre Agassi, Deion Sanders, Alonzo Mourning, and Pete Sampras as well as behind-closed-doors negotiations with the NBA and the NCAA as it considered a controversial plan for a collegiate Super Bowl brokered by Nike and super-agent Michael Ovitz.
Nike understood the power of imagery and knew how to market those images all over the world. A truly global corporation, Nike relied on capital from Japan to manufacture shoes in Asia sold to one out of every four athletic-shoe buyers in Europe. Katz follows Nike all over the world, taking us from a 19-year-old Korean gluing shoes in a factory, to an advertising wunderkind in Oregon creating the legendary "Bo Knows" campaign, to the fanatical Nike kids who rush into stores the day new shoes hit the street. Along the way, Katz describes the creation and design of Nike shoes, revealing technology worthy of a James Bond movie. He examines the charges leveled against Nike: that the company is exploiting Asian peasants, corrupting younger athletes, and recklessly stirring consumer fever in urban America. He also discusses the corporate spirit and strategies that have made Nike one of the great business stories of the late 20th century.
Just Do It is about the business of sports and the sport of business. It is also the story of a culture in which the sight of an athlete in flight can still evoke awe.Award-winning author Donald Katz, who received unprecedented and unrestricted access to Sears's records, meetings, and executives, delivers a spellbinding account that gives you a front-row seat to a corporate revolution. Katz is the founder and CEO of Audible, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment.
The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories
Performed by Brian Sutherland
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The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories collects journalist Donald Katz’s most fascinating profiles of people whose lives tell us something about business, adventure, sports, politics, culture, and in a brilliant, ancillary way, ourselves.
Katz’s opening story and the title piece of the book offers a hilarious yet appropriately reverential look at 72-year old Reg Mellor, unparalleled “ferret legging” champion of Yorkshire and the world. Other characters who populate this book include fitness guru Jack LaLanne, legendary entrepreneur Paul Hawken, and master political cartoonist and inspired troublemaker Bill Mauldin.
While this collection contains portraits that are varied in scene and tone, their depictions of obsession, delusion, perseverance, creativity, and good-heartedness—the list could go on—remain a constant. Each of these stories conveys a sense of their strangeness, wonder, and oddity of a life—a theme that provides a gravitational center to this multifarious selection drawn from twenty years of an award-winning non-fiction storyteller’s body of work.Not everyone could be a Nike guy. It required a certain attitude. For example: Michael Jordan refusing to wear Reebok at the 1992 Olympics, or Charles Barkley joking about becoming a porn star. In Just Do It, award-winning author Donald Katz shows how Nike created the spectacular imagery and marketing campaigns that made Jordan, Barkley, and Bo Jackson international icons. He also documented Nike's increasingly influential role in the management of its high-priced talent, taking us inside lucrative endorsement deals involving Jim Courier, Andre Agassi, Deion Sanders, Alonzo Mourning, and Pete Sampras as well as behind-closed-doors negotiations with the NBA and the NCAA as it considered a controversial plan for a collegiate Super Bowl brokered by Nike and super-agent Michael Ovitz.
Nike understood the power of imagery and knew how to market those images all over the world. A truly global corporation, Nike relied on capital from Japan to manufacture shoes in Asia sold to one out of every four athletic-shoe buyers in Europe. Katz follows Nike all over the world, taking us from a 19-year-old Korean gluing shoes in a factory, to an advertising wunderkind in Oregon creating the legendary "Bo Knows" campaign, to the fanatical Nike kids who rush into stores the day new shoes hit the street. Along the way, Katz describes the creation and design of Nike shoes, revealing technology worthy of a James Bond movie. He examines the charges leveled against Nike: that the company is exploiting Asian peasants, corrupting younger athletes, and recklessly stirring consumer fever in urban America. He also discusses the corporate spirit and strategies that have made Nike one of the great business stories of the late 20th century.
Just Do It is about the business of sports and the sport of business. It is also the story of a culture in which the sight of an athlete in flight can still evoke awe.Award-winning author Donald Katz, who received unprecedented and unrestricted access to Sears's records, meetings, and executives, delivers a spellbinding account that gives you a front-row seat to a corporate revolution. Katz is the founder and CEO of Audible, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment.
Valley of the Fallen and Other Places
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Few writers can match journalist Donald Katz’s ability to make an exotic locale familiar or transform an ordinary place into something peculiar if not completely weird. The Valley of the Fallen and Other Places gathers a pastiche of stories from around the world, each of which subtly underlines the relationship between geography and politics. Locations, counties, regions of the world emerge as characters in Katz’s panoramic cast–as fully drawn as the unusual people that occupy them–so that one realizes of each particular account, that this could only happen in a place like this. The setting for each of these pieces–whether home or abroad–provides a resonant backdrop for Katz’s startling perceptions and cultural acumen. He paints a portrait of Spain in which people are dying of political repression and vividly depicts Italy in the throes of a postwar capitalist hangover. Katz describes Arkansas, its history of racial strife notwithstanding, as an “American cultural ark” where respect for old-fashioned gumption and the tolerance for human eccentricity have fostered a renaissance of spirit. He captures the poignant ruin of political ideals gone amuck in the image of columns of Ethiopian children being herded through the night at gunpoint, undergoing political re-education. Katz’s observations of the Sinai, where “beliefs, convictions, even hunches become howling zeal,” contrast with Santa Fe’s “philosophical cogitating and quality-of-life improvement projects” in a New Age mecca that breeds tamer but equally fervent faiths. The cumulative effect of reading this eclectic collection is one of wonder about the mysterious and dazzling world in which we live, and the way our lives are shaped by our place in it.
Select Magazine Articles
Harper’s
