Age of Astonishment

An acclaimed journalist and novelistmakes history personal,painting a rich and vivid portrait of the time when America become modern by tracing the life of one man who lived through it. It all began with a black-and-white family snapshot of adistinguished elderly gentleman with a fine headofspun-sugar hair. He was wearing round, tortoise-shell glasses, a three-piece suit and an expressionofdelight mixed with terror, for on his right knee he was balancing a swaddled infant with a bewildered look. The baby is Bill morris, theman is his father's father, John Morris. That photo, taken in November 1952, the month the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the atom bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three years later, John Morrisdied at theageof92. Bill has nomemoriesofthe man, but even as a boy he found himself marveling at the changes John must have witnessed and experienced in his long lifetime. He was born into a slave-owning Virginia family during the Civil War, and he died at the peakofthe Cold War. At the timeofhis birth, the dominant technologies were the steam engine and the telegraph. He grew up in a world lit by kerosene and candles, he traveled by foot and horseback and wagon and drank water hauled from a well. He would live through Reconstruction, women's suffrage, Prohibition, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Korean War and the adventofnuclear weapons. Though he was from a slave-owning family, he changed his views as he grew into adulthood, and would unhappily witnessed the horrorsofJim Crow and work against it. Fluent in German, he would witness Hitler's rise to power, just oneofthe unimaginable occurrencesofhis time that suddenly became all-too-real. Deep in the Bible Belt, John was agnostic, perhaps even atheist, and held remarkably progressive beliefs on race relations, child rearing, women's rights and religious freedom. He married an Irish Catholic from upstate New York at a time when Catholics, Jews and Yankees were not warmly welcomed in the South. And in that traditionally bellicose region, he was a life-long pacifist. He was, in a word, a misfit, but one whose story embodies a pivotal generation in American history. An acclaimed journalist and novelist, Bill Morris makes history personal inTheAgeofAstonishment,painting a rich and vivid portraitofthe time when America become modern by tracing the lifeofone man who lived through it.