The Fifties by David Halberstam Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.95 You Save: $10.00 (56%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.38 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Fifties
Book Review: Entertaining and Informative
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is an excellent combination of political and social history told in a compelling narrative fashion. I was often disappointed when I came to the end of a chapter and had to switch topics. I found myself wanting to know more about the matter at hand, to find out how everything turned out.The author does a good job of avoiding any particular political bias. He rarely comments on whether a particular action was right or wrong. He just presents the facts and let them speak for themselves.
One insight that reading this book has given me is how drastically the advent of television altered the landscape of American society. Television lead to the trivialization of the political process, the evolution of advertising into a cultural force, and the steady growth of consumerism. With the large exception of the nuclear bomb, television is the worst thing the 1950's handed down to us.
Book Review: Epic Slice
Summary: 5 Stars
How can you be so broad on so narrow a strip of time. Well, Halberstam could. A great work of journalistic synthesis, a great synopsis of themes and actors and icons: Truman and Acheson, McCarthy and McArthur, Ike and Stevenson, Nixon (much) and Kennedy (much less), Oppenheimer and Teller, Tennessee Williams and Kerouac, Kazan and Brando, Kinsey and Hoover (Edgar of course), the Dulles brothers, Elvis and B.B.King, M.L.King and Betty Freedan, James Dean and Ricky Nelson, W.v.Braun and G.Powers.... The bomb, the car, the house, the store, the burger, the motel, the television, the pill... Primaries and elections, Korean War, Cold War, regime changes, race war, party war... Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba. Suburbia, advertising, sitcoms, quiz shows...
The party conflict probably the most important theme carrying the frame of the whole decade. From outside looking in: amazing, this emotion over mole hills. From Europe it is usually hard to see any difference between the Reps and the Dems, but how wrong that perception seems to be!
Clearly, DH is generally more on the 'liberal' side, though he minces no words about shameful histories of bosses and mobsters. No home run for Democrats. But I find that DH tries and succeeds to be balanced in his short portraits of most protagonists. There are 2 exceptions: Joe McCarthy and Foster Dulles are entirely negative. Not even a tiny attempt at mitigating circumstances.
The story includes a tale of 'original sin': the removal of Mossadegh and re-instatement of the Shah may well have been the start of a lot that we can observe now, definitely a major groundstone in the long term destruction of US relations with Iran. Was that the turning point when US foreign policy lost legitimacy in the eyes of large parts of the world?
Did you know that the model for Greene's Quiet American was the CIA agent who led the action against Mossadegh and that the man was a Roosevelt, a grandson of Teddy's? For your next trivial pursuit.
My favorite quote: somebody said about McCarthy, 'he didn't know Karl Marx from Groucho'.
Masterful arrangement of a broad mass of information about America and the world in a short piece of time. One negative comment: why are there no signposts? The chapters just carry numbers. If you look for a certain subject, you have to work your way through the index. Why no chapter titles?
I stumbled over one sentence in the chapter on MLK though: MLK is said to have 'studied Marxism diligently and found it formidable as a critique of capitalism but empty as theology - shamelessly materialistic in its antimaterialism'. Now that is either a misprint, or a serious mis-use of terms. Definitely no Marxist can ever have claimed to be antimaterialist, that would have led to straight excommunication.
Has anybody written the 60s epos yet? 70s?
Book Review: Excellent Overview of Postwar Years
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a totally engrossing introduction to the events and concepts that launched us into the modern age. Imagine what life was like during the advent of space travel, television, and suburban life. Can you imagine what it would've been like to be one of the first people to eat a McDonald's burger or watch Richard Nixon on national teevee insist for the first time that he wasn't a crook? This book details these facets of life in a very entertaining but informative manner.
To me, the most valuable sections of this book were the beginnings of the Vietnam War (which Halberstam's "Best and The Brightest" details) and the advent of the Civil Rights movement. Here, Halberstam has his best moments with very poignant and eloquent writing. I was deeply moved and disturbed by the account of the murder of Emmett Till and inspired by the courage of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the people involved in the Montgomery bus boycott.
In the last pages of the book, the birth of Communist Cuba is also explained. Political bumbling and face-saving is as American and timeless as Apple Pie!
As a Gen-Xer who has had to teach myself history due to a public education that always ended with Harper's Ferry, this book was helpful in filling in the holes between WWII and JFK's election. I heartily recommend it to everyone.
Book Review: Extremely readable book with good information!
Summary: 5 Stars
I'll start this review by making it known that I was born in 1985 and my parents were born in the mid-50s so even they don't have a good idea of what was going on at the time. I had to learn it all long after the fact. This book I'm sure is the best way to go about that, I just finished a U.S. History college course about the era and learned tons more from the book that the class didn't mention or didn't explain why the events were such a big deal. The book's focus is on the key people of the era, rather than the events that they were part of -- for example, the chapters on the Korean War are about General MacArthur and his replacement, not so much about the Korean War itself. This format is good for showing what kind of characters were prominent in the era and it gives the subjects more focus than the abstract story-telling would.
The book intimidated me when I first picked it up at the bookstore since it was 733 pages long, but once I decided to try it out, I practically flew through the pages. It's a very entertaining read, as I can attest to since most of this book was about things I wouldn't otherwise care about (ie. politics, early civil rights events, businessmen), yet the writer does a great job of making it all sound gripping enough to keep my attention through things as dull as Oppenheimer's dismissal from the hydrogen bomb project. Anyone that fears picking up a huge book, don't be afraid of this one. It's as fun to read as any fiction novel.
The content of this book is mostly politics, dealing with issues like McCarthyism, the spawning of the Civil Rights Movement, competition with the Soviet Union, America's interest enforced on third world nations, etc. The other half of the book describes the successful businessmen in the era that led to modern-day commonalities such as suburban housing, MacDonalds, and Holiday Inn. Lastly the book gives a taste of the culture with figures from the Beat movement, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe. I think everyone that I could possible think of as important to the Fifties was listed in this book except for one: where was Billy Graham? Even my college textbook listed Graham as a very popular figure in this era, along with the evangelical religion he spearheaded. Yet none of this was mentioned in the book. Why?
All in all, if you want a look into another time period in American culture, one that seems to be a confused transition period between the traditional rural America and the urban "culture of affluence," this is definitely a great one to pick up. Even though I've lived in America all my life, this book made me feel more a part of it and more understanding of it than the school system ever did.
- Richard
Book Review: Fascinating Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most interesting books I've read about the fifties. During that great postwar era, America was a financially strong, hopeful nation, largely free of the cynicism and negativity that began taking its toll on the collective psyche from the mid-sixties onward.
Here we get the inside scoop on the rise of McDonald's, the great car-design innovators at General Motors, the great Boston Celtic, Bill Russell, the proliferation of the great motel chains, the rise of James Dean, politics, and dozens of other fascinating essays and profiles covering that marvelous decade.
It all makes for fascinating reading, and I recommend it highly to others.