My pilgrim's progress

In My Pilgrim's Progress, George W. S. Trow gives us a provocative look at what's happened to America in our time - a guided tour of the media, the politics, and the personalities of the last half-century by one of our most persuasive social critics.

Trow takes 1950 as the year the Old World gave way to the New: Winston Churchill had just been named The Man of the Half-Century by Time magazine; George Bernard Shaw was still alive, and so was William Randolph Hearst. But before the next half-decade was out, the world represented by these powerful old men had disappeared.

To illustrate his points, Trow takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the New York Times of February 1950, from the thundering front pages where the terror of the H-bomb is making its first appearance to the early, sketchy, amateur television listings.

The son of a tabloid journalist from an old New York brownstone family, Trow was brought up in the Deepest Roosevelt Aesthetic - half FDR and half Walter Winchell. But he soon succumbed to the spell of Dwight David Eisenhower and the extraordinary/ordinary qualities of Ike's era. It is the thrust of Trow's book that both the Roosevelt authority and the Ike decencies are completely gone - and where are they now that we need them more than ever?