This is the first book-length history of the United States from the end of World War II to 1960. That taut Thursday when Franklin Roosevelt died, the first sickening fall of an atomic bomb, the heartfelt roar when Jackie Robinson trotted out in a Dodgers uniform, the meat you couldn't buy and the apartment you couldn't rent, high prices and boom times and higher prices and still more boom, a brilliant young man named Alger Hiss, President Harry Truman now fumbling, now making the bold decision to go into Korea, Arnold Toynbee and Mickey Spillane, Ezio Pinza singing "Some Enchanted Evening" and the bloody wastes of the Changjin Reservoir, "We like IKE," "We LIKE IKE," "WE LIKE IKE," pyramid games, the poodle bob, chlorophyll toothpaste, chlorophyll chewing gum, chlorophyll dog food, Senator Joseph McCarthy intoning "Point of order, point of order, Mr Chairman," President Dwight Eisenhower worrying millions and reassuring still more millions by his folksy middle-roadism--these and a thousand other memories flood back from the frightening, heartening, whirligig years after the end of World War II