"The Fifties" is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural
history of the ten years that David Halberstam regards as seminal in
determining what our nation is today. It is the decade of Joe McCarthy
and the young Martin Luther King, the Korean War and Levittown, Jack
Kerouac and Elvis Presley. Halberstam not only gives us the titans of
the age - Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and
Nixon - but also Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac
McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons
Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2
pilot Francis Gary Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and
"Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill. Here is a
portrait of a time of conflict, at once an age of astonishing material
affluence and a period of great political anxiety. We follow, among
other things, the quickening pace of American life and the powerful
impact of national television, still in its infancy, on American
society: from the Kefauver hearings to "I Love Lucy" to Charles Van
Doren and the quiz-show scandals to the young John Chancellor of NBC
covering the Little Rock riots and holding up a disturbing mirror to
America.
