It was, however, the postwar economic transformation that caused an even larger movement of people within Finland, a movement known to Finns as the Great Migration.

By European Community accounting, Italy is the world's fifth biggest industrialized economy behind the United States, Japan, Germany and France - a statistic that illustrates the nation's postwar transformation from ruin to riches.

The stories in "The Inland Sea" chronicle the coming of age of Vincent Torno, the youngest child in a troubled Italian-American family living in California's San Joaquin Valley, itself undergoing a postwar transformation.

The final chapters, on the postwar transformation of Tuscan life and the family's loss of both castles - Poggio became an orphanage, the heavily damaged castle a state property - are among her most affecting.

By "not so long ago," I mean in 1975, roughly the midpoint in the postwar transformation of American gastronomy, a revolution that is the subject of David Kamp's lively, smart, horrendously titled new book.

On the face of it, the postwar transformation of Japan appears even more astonishing than the prewar changes.

The postwar transformation of Times Square into a realm of drug-dealing and prostitution took a toll on the Rialto.

MacArthur, he says, also took unjustified credit for the postwar transformation of Japan.

He also argues that an allied victory could stimulate a postwar democratic transformation of Yugoslavia similar to that of West Germany after World War II.

White Plains took major steps last week toward completing the postwar transformation of its once languid commercial and residential center into a business and retail hub that already attracts 250,000 office workers and shoppers a day.