Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War
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The summer of 1939 was an epic turning point for America--a brief window between the Great Depression and World War II. It was the last season of unbridled hope for peace and prosperity; by Labor Day, the Nazis were in Poland. And nothing would come to symbolize this transformation from acute optimism to fear and dread more than the 1939 New York World's Fair. A glorious vision of the future, the Fair introduced television, the fax machine, nylon, and fluorescent lights. The "World of Tomorrow," as it was called, was a dream city built upon a notorious garbage dump--The Great Gatsby's infamous ash heaps. Yet these lofty dreams would come crashing down to earth in just two years. From the fair's opening on a stormy spring day, everything that could go wrong did: not just freakish weather but power failures and bomb threats.Amid the drama of the World's Fair, four men would struggle against the coming global violence. Albert Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, would... Publishers Weekly Former Cosmopolitan executive editor Mauro tries to underscore the irony of the 1939 1940 New York World's Fair, with its theme of world unity, opening on the brink of world war. But Mauro has multiple narratives, moving erratically between the evolution of the fair, with its slogan “Building the World of Tomorrow”; war brewing in Europe; and Germany gobbling up territory (Hitler refused the invitation to have a pavilion at the fair). As, one by one, European nations closed their pavilions, due to the war, the fair's theme rang increasingly hollow. During the fair's run, Einstein famously wrote to President Roosevelt expressing concern over Germany's stockpiling of uranium, giving rise to the Manhattan Project. To this unwieldy narrative Mauro adds the story of two NYPD bomb squad detectives killed when a bomb detonated on the fairgrounds on July 4, 1940. Aiming for another Devil in the White City, Mauro fails to pull all his threads together coherently, falling short of the mark. Photos. (July)
