1939: The Lost World of the Fair.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

This is an immensely charming book that aims to evoke the spirit of the 1939 World's Fair in New York--not just of the fair itself, but also of the city and of American culture generally. In clean, elegant prose, Gelernter lovingly describes the fair's exhibits and the architecture, technology, movies, magazines, urban culture, and social mores of the day; and, Doctorow-like, he weaves a narrative about fictional characters amid all the precise nonfiction details. He does quite a good job of bringing the moment back to life. Even the fictional characters' ways of speaking and thinking feel as if they belong to a different time from our own.

To call Gelernter nostalgic would be like calling Bill Gates affluent--it wildly understates the case. He regards 1939 as the halcyon moment in American life, the peak from which we have been descending ever since. What he loves about that time is the pervasive tone of optimism, civility, and respect, and the enthusiasm about applied technology. (It's impossible to avoid thinking of 1939 as a riposte to the Unabomber. Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale, is the Luddite terrorist's best-known victim.)

The fair itself was a paean to a streamlined future, with particular emphasis on consumer goods like automobiles, suburban homes, and refrigerators. The surrounding city was, by today's standards, nearly crime-free, and otherwise pervaded by a social trust that has since disappeared. Roosevelt on the radio, Fred Astaire movies at Radio City Music Hall, Moses and LaGuardia at the helm of New York, the music of Gershwin and Duke Ellington wafting through the air--that's the idea.

By moving the good-old-days baseline back from the fifties to the thirties and focusing on technology as well as family values, Gelernter has gotten more freshness out of nostalgia than it usually has. And because he has done his homework, he knows enough not to over-burnish the picture. He duly notes the much greater pervasiveness than today of poverty, discrimination, and war. Realizing that at the time he's apotheosizing, a majority of America's leading intellectuals probably were Communists in spirit if not actual membership, he doesn't bother to claim that 1939 was free of political correctness either. (After all, the term was invented around 1939.)

But he firmly insists that something essential and precious existed then and doesn't now. The word he returns to again and again is "authority": "Authority has all but...