DeLillo's epic story is a eulogy to post-WWII 'free' America. Some brilliant passages, and some forgettable ones. The story winds and weaves through different characters in the US (mainly New York) between the 1950s and 1980s, dabbling in popular culture (Sinatra and Lenny Bruce), politics (J Edgar Hoover) and TV-fed sensationalism. The strength of the story is sometimes lost in the use of popular characters, and the impact of the writing never hits home, possibly because other books have dealt with the dynamics of Cold War politics and post-Reaganomics in a more jarring way (such as Infinite Jest), but the strong sections are often phenomenal.