The Fifties by David Halberstam Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Fifties
Book Review: Fifties
Summary: 5 Stars
How the poor rose to middle class with homes. WWII scientist brought to US and their treatment. CIA being formed. MLK using TV to catch the attention of injustice that had been hidden from view. I could be here all day. It's the best history book on America I have ever read!Book Review: Great Insight Into Yesterday's vs. Today's Business World
Summary: 4 Stars
Given that I was not around for much of The Fifties, I found this book very informative; now I see this book as required reading for any baby boomer. I found the chapters containing the company histories of McDonald's and Chevrolet the most fascinating. How Ray Kroc et al "discovered" the shake/malt mixer for the mass market was wild! An unbelievably simple idea that seems so obvious today -- but at that time it was lauded as pure genius, somewhere between discovering sliced bread, the umbrella, or the elevator.
Compare and contrast these details with the recent book "The New New Thing," and you'll see how far we have come.
Book Review: Great Look at the 50s
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book to be both entertaining and educational. As a person who was born in 1961, I had a shallow knowledge of the key events during this time period. This book was able for me to have wonderful conversations with my mother who expounded on the topics I brought up to her feeding into a deeper understanding of that time period. I probably would have never thought of reading this book but for the fact that David Halberstam was the author and I love all his work. He will be missed by readers everywhere.Book Review: Great Storytelling, Not So Great Analysis
Summary: 5 Stars
From all I can gather, this is the finest book about American culture in the 1950s--a fascinating period because it links earlier American history to modern times better than any other decade.
Nobody should be intimidated by this book's length (about 730 pages). It is made up of many short sketches, and the whole story is told with so much intelligence that it is highly readable. I virtually never take on big books; I just lack the discipline for them. This one, for me, was about a week of highly pleasurable reading. It was, to use a phrase from other literary genres, a "page-turner" for me.
I came away from it with one disappointment. I would like to have been given more analysis of the Fifties than Halberstam delivers. His focus on major figures from the decade works to keep the book lively, but he rarely takes on major issues of why the decade developed as it did. For example, I'm confused by the degree to which Americans in the 50s were so paranoid about communism. Having just defeated the Third Reich and Japan, this nation was clearly the world's supreme super power, and yet the politics of the 50s were driven by fear to a remarkable degree. Halberstam is intelligent and occasionally analytical, but he works from individual stories upward to the larger whole rather than giving us larger patterns that are reflected by the major players of that era.
I'm not sure that is a fault. Given the choice of a book of individual stories or a book whose attention to individuals is to prove a thesis, I would clearly prefer Halberstam's relaxed, colorful, storytelling approach. Maybe I'm saying that reading this book makes me hungry for another book that would be more about the forest and less about the trees.
I am recommending this to all of my friends. I recommend it to you.
Book Review: Greatness
Summary: 5 Stars
Easily one of the best books I've ever read. Almost 800 pages and I'm into it for the third time. An amazing book about an amazing time. It's Halberstam at his best, and it doesn't get much better than that!