The Fifties
by David Halberstam
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Book Summary Information
Author: David HalberstamEdition: Unknown Binding
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Large Print
Published: 1993-06-29
ISBN: 0679747257
Number of pages: 1421
Publisher: Random House Large Print
Book Reviews of The Fifties
Book Review: Sloppily written and tendentious page-turner...
Summary: 4 Stars
Doesn't Fawcett Columbine employ copy-editors? This is one manuscript that needed a good polishing, but didn't receive it. I realize that in any book of over seven-hundred pages there will be errata...but holy man-boobed Jesus, I expect better of a Harvard-educated Jewboy like David Halberstam and his "professional" publisher. Sentence fragments, careless misspellings, and pleonasms abound...which prove a constant annoyance, despite their being amply countervailed by the book's narrative competence.
The Fifties is eminently readable, and stacked to the gills with information that would come in mighty handy on Jeopardy! Each chapter covers a main theme, personality, or historical episode, sometimes in an intercalary fashion with respect to the overall chronology. The book is almost never dull, and the omnipresent political bias of Halberstam is not difficult to suss out and control for.
It ain't art, but it is a highly worthwhile read that will fill in a bunch of blanks on a decade that most people today either romanticize or are completely ignorant of. And I bet it will act as a springboard for more specialized, in-depth reading on one of the many subjects presented.
Summary of The Fifties
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the Trade Paperback edition.
"In retrospect," writes David Halberstam, "the pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface." He shows how the United States began to emerge from the long shadow of FDR's 12-year presidency, with the military-industrial complex and the Beat movement simultaneously growing strong. Television brought not only situation comedies but controversial congressional hearings into millions of living rooms. While Alfred Kinsey was studying people's sex lives, Gregory Pincus and other researchers began work on a pill that would forever alter the course of American reproductive practices. Halberstam takes on these social upheavals and more, charting a course that is as easy to navigate as it is wide-ranging.
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