Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now [Hardcover]

Exhilaration and anxiety, the yearning for community and the quest for identity: these shared, contradictory feelings course throughOutside the Gates of Eden, Peter Bacon Haless ambitious and intoxicating new history of America from the atomic age to the virtual age.
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Born under the shadow of the bomb, with little security but the cold comfort of duck-and-cover, the postwar generations lived throughand ledsome of the most momentous changes in all of American history. Hales explores those decades through perceptive accounts of a succession of resonant moments, spaces, and artifacts of everyday lifedrawing unexpected connections and tracing the intertwined undercurrents of promise and peril. From sharp analyses of newsreels of the first atomic bomb tests and the invention of a new ideal American life in Levittown; from the music emerging from the Brill Building and the Beach Boys, and a brilliant account of Bob Dylans transformations; from the painful failures of communes and the breathtaking utopian potential of the early days of the digital age, Hales reveals a nation, and a dream, in transition, as a new generation began to make its mark on the world it was inheriting.
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Full of richly drawn set-pieces and countless stories of unforgettable moments,Outside the Gates of Edenis the most comprehensive account yet of the baby boomers, their parents, and their children, as seen through the places they built, the music and movies and shows they loved, and the battles they fought to define their nation, their culture, and their place in what remains a fragile and dangerous world.

Peter Bacon Halesis professor emeritus of the history of art and architecture and director emeritus of the American Studies Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of several books, including, most recently,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. He lives and writes in New Yorks Hulƒö