Author Details
Author Details
Halberstam, David
"A journalist, historian, and biographer, David Halberstam brings his idiosyncratic and stylistic approach to heavy subjects: the Vietnam War (in 1972?s The Best and the Brightest); the shaping of American politics (in 1979?s The Powers That Be); the American economy?s relationship with the automobile industry (in 1986?s The Reckoning); and the civil rights movement (in 1998?s Freedom Riders).
His books are loaded with anecdotes, metaphors, suspense, and a narrative tone most writers reserve for fiction. The resulting books -- many of them huge bestsellers -- have given Halberstam heavyweight status (he won the Pulitzer for international reporting in 1964) and established him as an important commentator on American politics and power.
Halberstam is also known for his sports books. In The Breaks of the Game, which a critic for The New York Times called ?one of the best books I?ve ever read about American sports,? he took on professional basketball.
In The Amateurs, he examined the world of sculling; in Summer of ?49 and October 1964, he focused on two pivotal baseball events: the Boston Red Sox?s exasperating near victory over the New York Yankees for the 1949 pennant, and the 1964 season, when the Yankees lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1999?s Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, Halberstam documented the making of a legend.
Always happy to extend his reach well beyond the subject at hand, Halberstam packs his books with social commentary as well as sports detail.
His writing routine is as strenuous and disciplined as that of any of the athletes he writes about. To sustain his steady output of extensively researched, almost-always-massive books, he allows no unscheduled interruptions: ?Most of us who have survived here [New York] after a number of years have ironclad work rules. Nothing interrupts us. Nothing,? he once wrote in The New York Times. ?We surface only at certain hours of the day.? "
