<P> <I>Front Stoops in the Fifties</I> recounts the monumental past of some of Baltimore's most famous icons who grew up during the "decade of conformity." Familiar faces such as Jerry Leiber, Nancy Pelosi, Thurgood Marshall, and Barry Levinson figure prominently in this gripping chronicle based on personal interviews and journalistic research.</P><P>Michael Olesker marks the end of the fifties with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. "It was as if millions of us suddenly felt the need to express our anxieties and our anger, as if Kennedy’s murder exposed some hypocrisy at the heart of the American dream," he writes. Focusing on the period leading up to this major turning point in U.S. history, Olesker looks to the individuals living through the changes that were just beginning to surface and would later come to prominence in the sixties.</P><P>The fifties are often remembered with longing as a more innocent time. But it was also a suffocating time for many. Alongside innocence was ignorance. Olesker tells the story of Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, daughter of the mayor, who grows up in a political home and becomes the first woman Speaker of the House. Thurgood Marshall, schooled in a racially segregated classroom, will go on to argue <I>Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka</I> before the Supreme Court and rewrite U.S. education law. Even the music changed. Olesker’s doo-wop portrait of Baltimore is nostalgic but with a hard edge.</P>