The Children
by David Halberstam

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Book Reviews of The Children

Book Review: A Superb, Masterful Retelling Of A Most Remarkable Story!
Summary: 5 Stars

One of the most admirable qualities of this superb book stems from the fact that Halberstam was in fact an eye-witness to many of the events described here, being a recent Harvard graduate who soon finds himself getting a heaping helping of ordinary racist reality in the 1950s-early 1960s American south. His interest in becoming a journalist draws him to a local city desk at an iconoclastically liberal southern paper that tolerates his naivety and cashes in on his energy and natural ability to write. Yet this is not a story in any manner about Halberstam. Rather, it is the fact that he waited so long to write about this era of his own career that makes it so mind-boggling, for he brings all of his mature powers of observation and description to bear on this story in a way that breathes fire and life into the oft-told tale, and makes each of the protagonists both more ordinary and more real.

This is an important aspect of the story itself, for now, some forty years later, it is easy to forget how young and unworldly many of these youngsters were. In facing the challenges of the times as well as their own well-founded fears, each of them gradually becomes an extraordinary person. Here we have a master of prose describing these extraordinary events with a breathtaking narrative, focusing on each of the several individuals in turn in showing how the welter of events, circumstances, and individual personalities combine to create a social revolution by daring to oppose the most hoary of racial taboos through the practice of public non-violent opposition. This is a story that describes the epic beginnings and dramatic evolution of a veritable social revolution in America, one that changed the face of our society forever.

This is a riveting book, one that well deserves the wide reading it has enjoyed to date. While the ground covered here has been canvassed before, most notably by Taylor Branch in his terrific two-volume history if the black struggle for equal rights in the United States during the 1950s-1970s, Halberstam's treatment is so personal, so well documented, and so meticulously narrated that one finds himself swept along with the tide of events and changes as the flood crests into a social revolution, drowning the vestiges and roots of the old culture in its path. There's a chorus of amazing and erstwhile protagonists here, from a young and naïve John L. Lewis to a crafty and devious Marion Berry, from an impressionable and impassioned Diane Nash to a determined and dedicated Rev. James Lawson, from an inspirational young Martin Luther King to a daring James Berel. This is truly a story that needs to be told and retold, for it comprises the quintessential American epic, something that could have happened nowhere but here.

This book carries the signature trademark qualities of all of Halberstam's work; it is a meticulously researched, powerfully narrated and beautifully described work of history, one that focuses on one of the most remarkable events of the 20th century, the rise and growth of the indigenous black civil rights movement in the American South. It a testimony to the power of non-violent protest, and a paean to the wisdom and understanding a generation of unworldly black youngsters brought to bear on their times. I highly recommend this book! Enjoy!

20th Century Books

• Books > Subjects > History > Americas > United States
• Social Sciences