Halberstam gives us the inside story of how America entrapped itself in the Viet Nam War. He shows how the legacy of McCarthyism and 1940’s politics over China left a decimated State Department and influenced JFK’s and LBJ’s thinking. He details the many times JFK and others who doubted the war...
”DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote p...
Firehouse by David Halberstam was a fantastically written book. However, it is not a book for the faint at heart. Halberstam takes 9/11 very seriously and pours the emotions of others into one book. I would say that this book is one for not only those affected by the event, but those who fought t...
David Halberstam’s reflective THE FIFTIES is a wonderful return to my formative years. I graduated from high school, went to college, got married, and had two children, all in the Fifties. Halberstam caught it all; not my personal story, but the events that occurred and their impact on life dur...
The Barnes & Noble Review: "The front page chronicles man's defeats. The sports page chronicles man's triumphs." So the adage goes, never more true than when surveying 100 years of American history through its coverage of sports. From Bobby Knight to Bobby Fischer, from Secretariat to Sugar Ray, ...
I picked up this book as the Korean War was something I'd never really taken the time to investigate, while my interest in history lay mainly in the Second World War and before that. I had seen on Goodreads that it had a great reputation, and came highly recommended, and I thought that it was a g...
okay, i'm going to divide the book into three parts, but first, here's what i had, going into this book: the dad of the family i nanny for (let's call him dad 1) went to yale for undergrad and harvard business school after that. he's about ten years older than (or ahead of) most of the characters...
This was reprinted from my website, Secure Immaturity. Please check it out and comment.Although I consider David Halberstam (may he rest in peace) one of my all-time favorite authors, I never actually finished one of his books. I read hundreds upon hundreds of pages in his books, for sure, but I ...
The Pulitzer prize-winning newsman's analysis of Kennedy's ideological journey toward increasing radicalism and a personal account of his subsequent successes (and single major defeat) along the campaign trail. Halberstam shows how Kennedy in his role as leader of the honorable opposition in the ...
It was a long time coming, almost 30 years, and it was over one of his most difficult opponents, himself—or perhaps more accurately, his lesser self. He finally admitted he had transgressed by going far beyond any acceptable line when he had belittled and taunted Joe Frazier during the hype for t...
Red Smith, who was the first to write about it, observed it, oddly enough, not in the behavior of the players but in the behavior of the umpires and the fans.“Today, conscious of the great unseen audience, they [the umpires] play every decision out like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. On...
He is best known for both his courageous coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times, as well as for his twenty-one nonfiction books—which cover a wide array of topics, from the plight of Detroit and the auto industry to the captivating origins of baseball’s fiercest rivalry. Halberstam wr...
Ben Duffy, the head of the agency and a close personal friend of the general, was particularly unhappy. BBD&O, then the third-largest advertising firm in the country, was more or less the Republican house firm. Duffy decided that they had to recast Ike. He was stiff and awkward in his formal ...