The Fifties by David Halberstam Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Fifties
Book Review: Halberstam must be knighed: a masterpiece in social history.
Summary: 5 Stars
Social history at its finest. The Fifties is a novel with real life characters. Barely misses a second of history in that seemingly idyllic but quite turbulent decade. His thesis which focuses on the tumoult of a decade which has always been viewed as being oatmeal-ish is unique and thoroughly proven. The chapters on Ray Kroc, Kemmons Wilson, Leavit, Korvettes, Pincus, Keansey, Brando, Monroe, the H-Bomb, Peyton Place, Harley Earle, Korea, Milton Berle, the Quiz Show scandals...actually all of the chapters, are fascinating. Please, I beg you, read this book. E-mail me, I will lend you my copy.
Book Review: Halberstam's The Fifties was exciting enough to be fiction.
Summary: 5 Stars
David Halberstam's Book The Fifties is a breathtaking study of the many aspects and directions the fifties took. By examining key issues, he shows us the debt our current life owes to this pivotal decade. Some chapters are so interesting I found myself telling friends of some of the interesting facts and anecdotes Halberstam's uncovers. In fact, he has a knack for making each chapter more exciting than the previous one--the reader can't wait to continue. This is unusual for non-fiction. I recommend this book to everyone, not just those who has lived through decade.Book Review: Harley Earl, Hamburgers, H-Bombs, and Elvis!
Summary: 4 Stars
David Halberstam has written an entertaining, complex, and penetrating survey of the 1950s, a profoundly formative decade which fifty years later, seems rooted in an innocence that never was, a decade that claimed to be the wellspring of American ideals and yet marked their first decline.
Halberstam manages, amazingly, to touch on virtually every aspect of the decade, from the rise of the Cold War, to Kinsey, McDonald's hamburgers, the nascent Civil Rights Movement, the rise of JFK, ever-bigger fins on cars, PEYTON PLACE, the Pill, Levittown, and Betty Furness. A fine overview, THE FIFTIES suffers only from its inclusiveness. Any one of these subjects could be the focus of a book unto itself.
Although Halberstam debunks the myth of the black and white "Leave It To Beaver" lifestyle we all seem to remember so well, relegating it properly to make-believe, his portrait of the 1950s does reveal a national consciousness of overarching confidence, sadly lacking since then. The United States had emerged from the lean years of the Depression and World War II as the ultimate superpower; it seemed that the good life was finally yours for the asking, and that the asking price was reasonable.
Television was the great equalizer then, just as the Internet is now; the Information Age had begun, and as the years melted into each other, more and more seemed to come faster and faster. In 1949 half the one million TVs in America were in New York City. By the end of the decade, they were ubiquitous.
Along with TV came a flood of consumer goods, all designed to make life simpler and more pleasurable (it is interesting to read that dishwashers were initally unpopular largely because they rendered housewives' tasks too easy---and it was the housewives who were complaining!). Frozen foods and fast foods seized the market. Cars morphed from a form of transportation into a form of performance art: the '59 Caddy with its 40 inch fins and the '59 Chevy with its swooping bat wings were the apotheosis of form over function.
And yet, in the midst of plenty, there were disquieting rumblings: the paranoia of the Cold War was at a fever pitch. The rampant consumerism of the era replaced "need" with "want". The sizzle sold the steak, regardless of its taste. Quality and craftsmanship suffered declines they have not yet recovered from, and the standardization of food, style, accommodation, and American expectation was begun. Although more and better was available to most citizens, in retrospect the Fifties, though in many ways truly "wonderful," seem like a decade spent preparing its denizens for a profound disappointment.
Halberstam's thesis is that the adoption of the pleasure principle as a national mindset in the Fifties has had a seminal impact on the future we now live in. Somehow, we have lost not our moral compass but our sense of self. Rather than being less consumed with mundane tasks, we are more consumed with inchoate worry; the general optimism of the Fifties has been replaced with anxiety as we realize that the standardization of life has removed any color or individuality, replacing bedrock values with shrill greed. Fifty years on, we are expected to take what is given us, whether we will or nil. Back then, the choice was still with us. In THE FIFTIES, Halberstam does not just turn back the clock; he makes us recognize that it had just warily begun to tick.
THE FIFTIES is the story not of a decade but of an American Evolution: More and bigger can be but is not always better, and progress is oft-times decline.
Book Review: Indispensible corrective for the phoney images most have of the fifties
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a big and quite wonderful tour of a decade that has been completely misrepresented in the general media and in the popular imagination. The fifties were a time of great change as a whole generation came home from a war with more experience and ideas than they could ever have had staying at home. Halberstam provides not only a history of that time, but tells us the story of how certain things began that changed America in ways that continue into our time. It was the time just after the Hiss-Chambers hearings and the rise of television. Theses were the times of the Korean War, McCarthy and Kefauver, of Kinsey, Hefner, Marilyn Monroe, and Brando, of mass marketing, Lucille Ball, Uncle Miltie, and Ozzie and Harriet. New styles of writing burst on the scene with Mickey Spillane, Ginsberg, Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Tennessee Williams. Of Sputnik, h-bombs, and open air testing where the mushroom clouds could be seen in Vegas.
He talks about the rise of subdivisions - suburbia - a house and a lawn out of the city and how all that began with Levittown using the principles of mass production and prefabrication and specialization that became so important in winning the War. How about affordable discount stores? The author shows us the rise of Korvette. What about the new mobility because of Eisenhower's building of the Interstate Highways? We get to see the rise of Holiday Inn and McDonalds. And never forget about the role of IBM in helping to collect and analyze data for all these massive new companies, our expanding government, and to aid the military in the cold war.
If you have any memories of this time it will be a wonderful and nostalgic tour of a time long gone. If you are younger and want to learn the realities of what went on after WWII and how it gave rise to the sixties, this book is simply indispensable.
Terrific.
Book Review: Masterful
Summary: 5 Stars
The late David Halberstam will be sorely missed. But, in "The Fifties," he tackles his most ambitious subject, "the decade that has yet to find its historian." Halberstam does not try to be that, but through carefully chosen and beautifully researched vignettes from the realms of television, politics, pop culture, and rising consumerism, he does manage to nail an essential "zeitgeist" of the decade. And his essential hypothesis, that the 1950's were the stage setting for the later convulsions and redefinitions of the 1960's and 1970's, is beautifully supported and passionately argued. No one could read this book and fail to come away with the appreciation that this decade in American history was far more complex than we used to think. It is a demonstration of "the way we never were" and how faulty historical memory has done little justice to the people and the time who were wrestling with a changing world and society and trying to make sense of it all.
HIGHLY recommended, a "must read" for the Twentieth Century American history student or American history enthusiast.