FANTASTIC INTERIM

Sub-titled ""American Manners, Morals and Mistakes between Versailles and Pearl Harbor"", this is a spirited, slashing history of America over the past quarter century in which she does not show up too well. Only-Yesterdaying the political and international scene as well as the social, Robinson shows how America, in 1918, frightened by the responsibility of assuming world leadership, went off on a ""gilded carrousel of escapism"" in a fabulous, fatuous era of ballyhoo, corruption, speculation, adulation and nonsense. Her institutions of religion, education and democracy sagged; her leadership, under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover varied from the corrupt to the misguided; she went in for business for business' sake, for cults and booms, until eventually, came depression and chaos. Roosevelt and the New Deal, after 15 muscle bound years, a transfusion not a cure, a foreign policy of neutrality, and isolationist sentiment torpedoed with Pearl Harbor. Eminently readable, blunt, biting reportage which is an essentially true picture of these foolish decades.