The Fifties by David Halberstam Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Fifties
Book Review: Simplistic, heavy-handed, left wing, factually inaccurate.
Summary: 2 Stars
I thought the movie "Pleasantville" was simplistic and heavy-handed in its treatment of fifties-era conservative values as evil and nineties liberalism as paradisiacal. But this book makes that movie look balanced. The author starts with an amusingly typical leftist retelling of the Hiss case, in which an uninformed reader is likely to incorrectly conclude that Hiss's guilt or innocence is still a historical mystery. The author is too busy delivering broad casual slanders of Whittaker Chambers and the HUAC members to bother with a description of the overwhelming evidence of Hiss's guilt (his ad hominem attacks, in which he fails to explain which member of the HUAC is guilty of which charge, can only be described as McCarthyesque). He also claims Hiss was tried for perjury rather than espionage because of a lack of evidence supporting an espionage claim, when in fact the statute of limitations had run on any espionage claim which could have been supported by Chambers' "pumpkin papers." Apparently, the book's publisher no longer employs a fact-checking department (or a proofreader who knows what a sentence fragment is). After reading that first chapter, what's left is predictable: Halberstam's left wing idols all wear white hats, surprise, everyone who disagrees with his visions are wearing black. Garbage and tripe.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.
Book Review: Stunningly comprehensive portrait of America in the 1950s
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a delightful and encyclopedic survey of the major events and personalities in the United States in the 1950s. The title is, therefore, a bit of a misnomer. The book is not about the decade on a global scale, but merely the fifties in America. Halberstam writes of the decade in a clear, fast-moving prose, and despite the books enormous bulk, is actually a remarkably fast read.Halberstam offers no explicit themes or theses, but if there is an overarching implicit theme, it is the Fifties not as a time of innocence as frequently assumed, but a time of viciousness, meanness, and loss of whatever remaining innocence American might possess. Indeed, the book ends with Eisenhower looking at Nixon and Kennedy, and exclaiming that he didn't like either of them.
What THE FIFTIES primarily does is hold up a mirror to the fifties, and reflects the major events and especially the major figures of the decade. In fact, while specific events do receive attention, the book is essentially a succession of character sketches, and even the major events themselves are discussed through focusing on particular individuals. What is amazing is what a satisfactory job Halberstam does of writing about both unfamiliar and famous individuals.
By and large, Halberstam deals with just about every major figure one would expect. If I had any complaints--and these would be minor--I would argue that some major art forms received almost no attention in the book. For instance, while he has a full chapter on the bestseller PEYTON PLACE and writes about pulp master Micky Spillane, there is no discussion of any major writers. Nor does he write about cinema in general (though James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe receive attention), or changes in art. Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips receive a chapter, but surprisingly little about the development of rock and roll is mentioned apart from that. I think there are two reasons for this. First, even though the text runs to around 730 excluding notes and index, a book of this scale can't deal with everything. Second, despite the books enormous scope, Halberstam isn't determined to write about every aspect of the fifties, but only on every aspect that was distinctive of the decade and made it unique in comparison to what came before and that led to what would come after. Implicit throughout the book is the question, "What made this decade unique and different?"
By the end of the book, the reader will have read about Truman, Ike, Korea, Matt Ridgway, McCarthy, Elia Kazan, Orville Faubus, Holiday Inn, MacDonald's, Little Rock, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, the Kinsey report, the development of the Pill, Tennessee Williams, the Dulles brothers, Robert Taft, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Oppenheimer and Teller and the Super, Hoover, MacArthur, Giap, Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel, the CIA, Levittown, Francis Gary Powers, Werner von Braun, Kelly Johnson, Martin Luther King, Emmitt Till, John Chancellor, Harry Ashmore, Lucy, Milton Berle, and a vast host of other major and minor figures.
I recommend this book as strongly as possible both for those who either lived through the decade or through the wake of the decade, or those who no little or nothing about it. At the end of the book, I was convinced that the Fifties was perhaps one of the two or three key decades of the century, and perhaps the decade in which the world we know now, dominated by TV, mass communication, fast food, sexuality, celebrity, massive military expenditures, computers, advertising, and technology, was born.
Book Review: Super ancedotes in the midst of history
Summary: 4 Stars
Halberstam tells a great story of the fifties and the lead into the sixties via great stories and ancedotes. Easy reading and engrossing. A great history book and fun to read, very insightful as well. Typical Halberstam an editor would be a good idea.Book Review: Superb
Summary: 5 Stars
I decided to buy the book after seeing the TV series based on the book. It is superb. As someone who was born in 1970, my only exposure to the 50s was through Happy Days. David Halberstam's book provided a superb account of this decade and how it affected the 60's and beyond. His writing style is captivating.