"The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago." So begins [this book], the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s ... It was a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption. Even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within." In rural Quarterday, on the far margin of Chicago's North Shore, nineteen-year-old...