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I was saddened to hear about the sudden death - car accident in San Francisco - of writer/newspaperman David Halberstam. The current Times obit is HERE - it appears to be a brief squib from the AP right now; I assume the paper he served (and which stood by him) in difficult times will do more for him later.
There was plenty of writing about the death of Kurt Vonnegut around the blogs, and he certainly meant a great deal to me, but nothing worth saying that others weren't saying better. On the other hand, I don't know a lot of people who read Halberstam's books, unfortunately, and I might as well recommend my favorites as I'm thinking of him now.
He's probably best known for The Best and the Brightest, his epic account of the bad decisions that got America into Vietnam. A great book informationally, I still find it a slog to read compared to his other work. Still, it's amazing to me that, according to Amazon, it appears to be out-of-print (though available used).
I prefer The Powers That Be, a history of the news media in the US, The Fifties, an overview of the decade, which was also turned into an excellent series on The History Channel (with annoying bookends added on the original broadcasts in which Roger Mudd smugly dismisses the achievements of the liberal forces profiled in that evening's show), and my favorite, The Reckoning, a history of the auto industry in the US and Japan -- in my dreams, I have the skill and the budget to turn this massive book into an opera. I generally wind up reading these three at least once a year, and they're always worth revisiting.
An excellent nonfiction work in which Halberstam figures greatly as a character is William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, an account of the first groups of American journalists covering Vietnam in country, and their growing disillusionment with the war and the US government.
I first encountered Halberstam in the parody figure that Garry Trudeau made of him for a week in Doonesbury as he interviewed Rick Redfern for his upcoming "massive tome," The Creme de la Creme. So for years I somewhat thought of him as the pompous ass Trudeau played him as. Later, reading his work and seeing interviews with him, I was pleased to note that, judging from his personality, probably no one laughed longer and harder at Trudeau's version of Halberstam than Halberstam himself.
He had a book on the Korean War scheduled to come out later this year. I hope he left it in some kind of publishable form. I'd like to read it.
There was plenty of writing about the death of Kurt Vonnegut around the blogs, and he certainly meant a great deal to me, but nothing worth saying that others weren't saying better. On the other hand, I don't know a lot of people who read Halberstam's books, unfortunately, and I might as well recommend my favorites as I'm thinking of him now.
He's probably best known for The Best and the Brightest, his epic account of the bad decisions that got America into Vietnam. A great book informationally, I still find it a slog to read compared to his other work. Still, it's amazing to me that, according to Amazon, it appears to be out-of-print (though available used).
I prefer The Powers That Be, a history of the news media in the US, The Fifties, an overview of the decade, which was also turned into an excellent series on The History Channel (with annoying bookends added on the original broadcasts in which Roger Mudd smugly dismisses the achievements of the liberal forces profiled in that evening's show), and my favorite, The Reckoning, a history of the auto industry in the US and Japan -- in my dreams, I have the skill and the budget to turn this massive book into an opera. I generally wind up reading these three at least once a year, and they're always worth revisiting.
An excellent nonfiction work in which Halberstam figures greatly as a character is William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, an account of the first groups of American journalists covering Vietnam in country, and their growing disillusionment with the war and the US government.
I first encountered Halberstam in the parody figure that Garry Trudeau made of him for a week in Doonesbury as he interviewed Rick Redfern for his upcoming "massive tome," The Creme de la Creme. So for years I somewhat thought of him as the pompous ass Trudeau played him as. Later, reading his work and seeing interviews with him, I was pleased to note that, judging from his personality, probably no one laughed longer and harder at Trudeau's version of Halberstam than Halberstam himself.
He had a book on the Korean War scheduled to come out later this year. I hope he left it in some kind of publishable form. I'd like to read it.
