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The 1950s According to David Halberstam
April 26, 2007

For several weeks now--more like a couple months--I've been reading David Halberstam's 800-page book of that misunderstood decade, The 1950s. I take in about a chapter a night, after putting my son to sleep.

He has effortlessly taken me through the decade of martinis and Eisenhower, beginning with the bombs of Oppenheimer and Teller, through McCarthyism and Hoover's FBI. While Ford was amping their assembly line in Detroit, Levitt was doing the same with houses on Long Island. It was the decade of kitchen appliances intended to make a woman's job easier and Ozzie and Harriet families--it was the decade of conformity, the decade of playing ignorant.

Did I mention it was the decade of the martini?

It was also the era of Rosa Parks, The Beats, Elvis Presley, Peyton Place, and The Pill.

But one subject Halberstam wonderfully evoked for me--to my surprise--was that forgotten police action, the Korean War (which prompted me to add M*A*S*H to our Netflix queue).

That war happens to be the subject of his forthcoming, now posthumous book due out this fall, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

Posted by Mark Rotella on April 26, 2007 | Comments (0)