Easton Press David Halberstam books
The Next Century - signed first edition - 1991
The Summer of '49 -1996
The Fifties - 2 volume set from Library of American History - 1996
War in a Time of Peace - signed first edition - 2001
The Best and The Brightest - signed modern classic - 2005
Moments: Pulitzer Prize photographs ( writen with Hal Buell ) - 2005
Franklin Library David Halberstam books
Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan Biography - signed first edition - 1999
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David Halberstam biography
Halberstam was of Jewish ancestry and was raised in the Bronx, New York, and in Winsted, Connecticut (he was a classmate of Ralph Nader). He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor of arts in 1955, and also served as managing editor of the University's daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid-1960s, Halberstam covered the Civil Rights Movement for The New York Times. While there, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at The New York Times, including his eyewitness account of the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Ðức.At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.
Halberstam put an enormous effort into his book about President John F. Kennedy's foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest. Synthesizing material from dozens of books and many dozens of interviews, Halberstam focused on the odd paradox that those who crafted the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same men were unable to imagine and promote anything but a bloody and disastrous course in the Vietnam War.
Thousands of readers began The Best and the Brightest feeling that the U.S. must pursue the war in Vietnam until "victory" was achieved, but became convinced by Halberstam's book that the U.S. could not win and therefore should withdraw from Vietnam.
After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam plunged right into another "big" book and in 1979 published an informative book about some of the major media outlets in America. The Powers That Be gave compelling profiles of men like William S. Paley of dBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, Phil Graham of The Washington Post—and many others.
In 1980 his brother, cardiologist Michael J. Halberstam, was murdered during a burglary. Halberstam never commented publicly on his brother's murder.
Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at Bill Walton and the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the baseball pennant race battle between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, called Summer of '49.
After publishing four books in the 1960s, including the novel "The Noblest Roman" as well as ""The Making of a Quagmire" and "The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy," Halberstam published three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was en route to completing at least two others before his death. In the wake of 9/11, Halberstam wrote a sensitive book about that tragedy, Firehouse, which describes in detail Engine 40, Ladder 35 of the New York City Fire Department.
Death
Halberstam was killed April 23, 2007 at about 10:30 a.m. PDT in a traffic accident in Menlo Park, California near the Dumbarton Bridge. He was a passenger in a Toyota Camry driven by a UC Berkeley Journalism School graduate student, Kevin Jones, which was broadsided in the passenger side by an Infiniti sedan while making a left turn from Bayfront Expressway to Willow Road. The Toyota was crushed two feet into the passenger space. Halberstam was pronounced dead at the scene. Jones was not seriously injured.
Halberstam had been in the San Francisco Bay Area for an event at UC Berkeley on Saturday, April 21. At the time of his death, he was on his way to the Bay Area city of Mountain View to interview Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle for his next book, The Game, about the 1958 NFL Championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Halberstam had just finished a book about the Korean War called The Coldest Winter, due out later in 2007. Halberstam had also been scheduled to deliver the keynote address and receive an honorary degree at the 2007 commencement ceremonies at Brandeis University on May 20.
Halberstam lived in New York City. He was survived by his wife Jean and their daughter Julia, a school teacher.
David Halberstam books in order
(1961) The Noblest Roman
(1965) The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era
(1967) One Very Hot Day
(1968) The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy
(1971) Ho
(1972) The Best and the Brightest
(1979) The Powers That Be
(1981) The Breaks of the Game
(1985) The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal
(1986) The Reckoning
(1989) Summer of '49
(1991) The Next Century
(1993) The Fifties
(1994) October 1964
(1999) The Children
(1999) Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made
(2001) War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
(2002) Firehouse
(2003) The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship
(2005) Bill Belichick: The Education of a Coach
Source and additional information: David Halberstam