Books, Arts & Manners: 1940: Historical Launch

From This Moment On: America in 1940, by Jeffrey Hart (Crown, 326 pp., $22.50)

Even as it is commonly agreed that nothing was quite the same again after the fateful year 1917, so Jeffrey Hart’s thesis is that 1940 was the next great historical launch. So much, after that, would be different, different in politics, in economics, in culture.