An acclaimed journalist and novelist makes 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 a distinguished
elderly gentleman with a fine head of spun-sugar hair. He was
wearing round, tortoise-shell glasses, a three-piece suit and an
expression of delight mixed with terror, for on his right knee he
was balancing a swaddled infant with a bewildered look. The baby is
Bill morris, the man 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 Morris died at the age of 92.
Bill has no memories of the 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 peak of the Cold
War. At the time of his 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 advent of
nuclear weapons. Though he was from a slave-owning family, he
changed his views as he grew into adulthood, and would unhappily
witnessed the horrors of Jim Crow and work against it. Fluent in
German, he would witness Hitler's rise to power, just one of the
unimaginable occurrences of his 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 in The Age of
Astonishment, painting a rich and vivid portrait of the time when
America become modern by tracing the life of one man who lived
through it.
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