| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780786888627 | | Publisher: Hyperion | | Publish Date: 9/16/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 207914764 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.5H x 6L x 1.75T | | Pages: 736 |
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| | | The bestselling author of the thrilling work on the Vietnam War, "The Best and the Brightest," offers unrivaled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another dark corner of American history: the Korean War.
Annotation:
The late David Halberstam brings to this history of the Korean War the same combination of research, analysis, and narrative skill he delivered in THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Vietnam War. THE COLDEST WINTER chronicles the political and military missteps by the larger-than-life personalities, including General Douglas MacArthur, as he shows how their gross misunderstanding took the nation off-course and exacted a costly toll on America's fighting men, whom he depicts as heroes in a bad war. THE COLDEST WINTER was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in History.
| Praise| "Commanding and evocative as Halberstam is about the brutal face of battle, his career's forte of explaining political contexts is the crucial advantage of this work, offering answers on how America became involved in the Korean conflict." - Gilbert Taylor July 2007 "[A] vivid chronicle packed with the anecdotes and the stories of great men." 07/01/2007 "Alive with the voices of the men who fought, Halberstam's telling is a virtuoso work of history." 07/27/2008 |
| Author Bio| David Halberstam | | The son of a doctor and a teacher, David Halberstam grew up in the New York area, went to Harvard, and immediately after graduating went to Mississippi for his first newspaper job--from which he was abruptly dismissed. His second job was with the legendary Nashville Tennessean, where he covered the civil rights movement and learned the craft of reporting from his colleagues. "With all due respect to the faculty," he told a 2005 Columbia University graduating class, ''in the end, journalists mostly teach each other." His experiences in the south eventually found their way into one of his many best-selling books, THE CHILDREN, in 1999. In 1960, Halberstam got a job with the New York Times and was sent to Vietnam, where his accurate reporting upset President Kennedy enough to cause him to complain to the newspaper's publisher (to no avail) and for which Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. After leaving the Times, he embarked on perhaps the most noted book of his career, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, published in 1972, which analyzed how the U.S. got mired in the Vietnam War as the result of bad decisions by supposedly gifted advisors, including McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara. | |Halberstam wrote primarily for magazines such as Harper's and Esquire, focusing on American life, and his books include a popular history, THE FIFTIES, and a book on media and power, THE POWERS THAT BE. Halberstam is also remembered for many books on sports, including THE SUMMER OF '49, which chronicles the rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, as well as OCTOBER, 1964, on the last days of the Yankee dynasty, and a book on rowing called THE AMATEURS. He wrote THE EDUCATION OF A COACH, a portrait of Bill Belichick, and was working on a book on the football player Y.A. Tittle when he was killed in a car accident in 2007. Those last books may reflect Halberstam's own dedication to the younger generations of journalists by sharing anecdotes and giving advice. In that same 2005 commencement address at Columbia, he advised the graduates to have courage in life and work, and to resist the efforts of others to scare them off: "Never, never, never let them intimidate you." |
| Awards |
Pulitzer Prize (2008) |  | finalist, History | | |
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