American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960

Rutgers social historian O'Neill (Coming Apart recalls the postWorld War II era when millions of veterans with government aid went to college, bought suburban homes and later, with growing families, prospered enough to relish such cultural artifacts as barbecues, TV and shopping malls reached by super autos on superhighwaysclearly a high point in U.S. social history. The author, however, has trouble sustaining his ""high'' as he examines more turbulent aspects of the period. In this survey-summary, he also writes about such national traumas as the Cold War, Korea, Sputnik and the space race, McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Eisenhower ``equilibrium'' and the rise of Nixon,the H-bomb and test-ban negotiations, beatniks and Elvis Presley, racial conflict and Martin Luther King Jr. A fine read for those who want a reminder of the so-called good old days, or to whom the era is ancient history. (January 5)