Description
About what age can one not make the Dickensian observation that it was the best of times and the worst of times? For Joseph C. Goulden, growing up in Marshall, Texas, the years 1945-50 were distinguished by an uncle's return from the war, the family's new Nash, radio programs, the traumas of adolescence, But what was happening to the country beyond the confines of Marshall? Aside from the baseball success of the St. Louis Cardinals, Goulden didn't know or care: those years sailed right past him.
Twenty-five years later Goulden did care and wanted to know. Armed with his journalist's experience and determination as well as an intense curiosity about America between V-J Day and the Korean War, Goulden set out to research and write an historical narrative, the most thorough and readable of the genre since Studs Terkel's Hard Times.
The Best Years are cast in chiaroscuro. There were light moments as America sought to amuse herself with nonsense songs and quiz shows. But the dominant mood was anything but light. In dramatic detail Goulden recreates the mounting tensions of the cold war, the HUAC hearings that witnessed Whittaker Chambers' confrontation with Alger Hiss and the rise of Richard Nixon's political star, the 1948 election, in which Dewey "snatched defeat from the jaws of victory," and the ominous closing of the 40's, when a disappointed and divided America faced the new decade and the Korean War and McCarthyism.
1976
ISBN:0689107080
