The novel opens with the Shot Heard Round the World, Bobby Thomson's home run in 1951, and traces the baseball as it passes through half a century of American history: the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, waste management, art, murder, memory. DeLillo worked on it for years, and the result is his most ambitious novel, a social panorama that moves backward and forward through time. The prose is cool and precisely observed, finding poetry in garbage and terror. Paranoia and connection interweave; everything is linked, or seems to be. The novel captures the texture of American consciousness in the atomic age. It is the great novel of the second half of the twentieth century.