New Releases by David Halberstam

Four New York Times bestsellers by a “remarkable” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist capture and celebrate America’s passion for sports (The Seattle Times). Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Halberstam, preeminent chronicler of the American experience, focuses his meticulous narrative gifts on some of Major League Baseball’s most iconic moments, training for the Olympics, and a remarkable profile of hoops legend Michael Jordan. Summer of ’49: In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Halberstam brings to stirring life the unforgettable season that cemented baseball as America’s pastime. A nation in transition is gripped by a pennant race for the ages: the Boston Red Sox, led by Ted Williams’s unearthly bat skills, versus the New York Yankees and Joe DiMaggio’s legendary heroics. Every hit on and off the field crackles across the page “in such an enjoyable, interesting, and informative manner that a reader needn’t be a baseball fan to appreciate the book” (Library Journal). October 1964: The 1964 World Series pitted the established Yankees against the upstart St. Louis Cardinals in an epic, seven-game seesaw battle that seemed to reflect the tensions of a nation in turmoil. The barnburner included a cast of legends—Mantle, Maris, Ford, Gibson, Brock—and enough game-changing plays to last a lifetime. Halberstam captures every moment with “a fluidity of writing that make[s] the reading almost effortless. . . . Absorbing” (San Francisco Chronicle). The Amateurs: This inspirational bestseller focuses Halberstam’s brilliant reportage on the travails and triumphs of Olympic rowing. Introducing us to a cast of highly driven athletes at the 1984 single sculls trials in Princeton, Halberstam delves deep into their struggles, motivations, and failures—but in the end only one will represent the United States at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Informative and compelling, Halberstam “maintains the suspense to the very last stroke” (Sports Illustrated). Playing for Keeps: A wildly entertaining and revealing portrait of global icon Michael Jordan and the rise of the NBA. With his usual impeccable research and gripping storytelling, Halberstam covers the whole court, from the transformative rivalry of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson to the invention of ESPN to Spike Lee’s Nike commercials to every unforgettable playoff game that built Jordan’s legend. “Filled with salty, informed hoops talk” (Publishers Weekly), this “remarkable book . . . [is] a must-read for basketball fans, admirers of Jordan, and anyone who seeks to understand sports in America today” (Bill Bradley).

"Sometimes sports mirrors society, sometimes it allows us to understand the larger society a little better. But mostly, it is a world of entertainment of talented and driven young men and women who do certain things with both skill and passion." --David Halberstam David Halberstam was a distinguished journalist and historian of American politics. He was also a sports writer. Everything They Had brings together for the first time his articles from newspapers and magazines, a wide-ranging collection edited by Glenn Stout, selected over the full scope of Halberstam''s five decades as one of America''s most honored journalists. These are dazzling portraits of some of the most compelling sports figures of our era, the superstars of popular sports like basketball, football, and baseball, but also fishing, soccer, and rowing, and the amateur athletes who play for the love of the game. In "My Dinner with Theodore," Halberstam recounts his long anticipated--and unforgettable--meeting with Red Sox legend Ted Williams. Against the backdrop of 1960s Nashville, he beautifully recounts a lifelong love of football in "How I Fell in Love with the NFL." And "Men Without Women," set on a fishing expedition in Patagonia, is more than a hunt for giant brown trout--it is a story of fishing, friendship, and fellowship. These and many more stories exemplify the breadth and depth of David Halberstam''s devotion to diverse sports and his respect and fascination for the men and women who play them so well. The result is an intimate and personal collection that reveals the issues and the ideals David Halberstam cared about--racial equality, friendship, loyalty, and character--and creates a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the author himself. Everything They Had takes its rightful place alongside Halberstam''s bestselling sports titles, which include The Breaks of the Game, The Amateurs, Summer of ''49, and The Education of a Coach.

“Far and away the best book written about Senator Kennedy” from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author (The New York Times). Structured around the 1968 Democratic presidential campaign, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy offers an in-depth exploration of Robert Kennedy, both as a man and a politician. Kennedy’s mass appeal to minority groups, his antiwar stance, and his support from Catholics made him unlike any other politician of his stature in the late 1960s. Acclaimed journalist David Halberstam dives into Kennedy’s career, covering his work as US attorney general and campaign manager for his brother John, his run for a New York state senate seat, and his candidacy in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary. Through this crucial period, he charts Kennedy’s evolution as one of the nation’s most clear-headed progressives, ultimately revealing a man who—even now—personifies the shift toward a more equal America. This ebook features an illustrated biography of David Halberstam including rare images from the author’s estate.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist looks at the life and times of the Chicago Bulls superstar— “The best Jordan book so far” (The Washington Post). One of sport’s biggest superstars, Michael Jordan is more than an internationally renowned athlete. As illuminated through David Halberstam’s trademark balance of impeccable research and fascinating storytelling, Jordan symbolizes the apex of the National Basketball Association’s coming of age. Long before multimillion-dollar signings and lucrative endorsements, NBA players worked in relative obscurity, with most games woefully unattended and rarely broadcast on television. Then came Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Jordan’s two great predecessors, and the game’s status changed. The new era capitalized on Jordan’s talent, will power, and unrivaled competiveness. In Playing for Keeps, Halberstam is at his investigative best, delving into Jordan’s expansive world of teammates and coaches. The result is a gripping story of the athlete and media powerhouse who changed a game forever. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s in-depth look at four media-business giants: CBS-TV, Time magazine, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. In this fascinating New York Times bestseller, the author of The Best and the Brightest, The Fifties, and other acclaimed histories turns his investigative eye to the rise of the American media in the twentieth century. Focusing on the successes and failures of CBS Television, Time magazine, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, David Halberstam paints a portrait of the era when large, powerful mainstream media sources emerged as a force, showing how they shifted from simply reporting the news to becoming a part of it. By examining landmark events such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s masterful use of the radio and the unprecedented coverage of the Watergate break-in, Halberstam demonstrates how print and broadcast media as a whole became a player in society and helped shape public policy. Drawn from hundreds of exhaustive interviews with insiders at each company, and hailed by the Seattle Times as “a monumental X-ray study of power,” The Powers That Be reveals the tugs-of-war between political ambition and the quest for truth in a page-turning read. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

This vivid New York Times bestseller about 1950s America from a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist is “an engrossing sail across a pivotal decade” (Time). Joe McCarthy. Marilyn Monroe. The H-bomb. Ozzie and Harriet. Elvis. Civil rights. It’s undeniable: The fifties were a defining decade for America, complete with sweeping cultural change and political upheaval. This decade is also the focus of David Halberstam’s triumphant The Fifties, which stands as an enduring classic and was an instant New York Times bestseller upon its publication. More than a survey of the decade, it is a masterfully woven examination of far-reaching change, from the unexpected popularity of Holiday Inn to the marketing savvy behind McDonald’s expansion. A meditation on the staggering influence of image and rhetoric, The Fifties is vintage Halberstam, who was hailed by the Denver Post as “a lively, graceful writer who makes you . . . understand how much of our time was born in those years.” This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

This #1 bestselling baseball classic of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is “dazzling . . . heart-stopping . . . A celebration of a vanished heroic age” (The New York Times Book Review). The summer of 1949: It was baseball’s Golden Age and the year Joe DiMaggio’s New York Yankees were locked in a soon-to-be classic battle with Ted Williams’s Boston Red Sox for the American League pennant. As postwar America looked for a unifying moment, the greatest players in baseball history brought their rivalry to the field, captivating the American public through the heart-pounding final moments of the season. This expansive story captures an era, incorporating profiles of the players and their families, fans, broadcasters, baseball executives, and sportswriters. Riveting in its blend of powerful detail and exhilarating narrative, The Summer of ’49 is Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam’s engrossing look at not only a sports rivalry, but a time when America’s very identity was wrapped up in its beloved national game. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

New York Times Bestseller: “A historical overview of the auto industry in the United States and Japan [and] the gradual decline of U.S. manufacturing” (Library Journal). After generations of creating high-quality automotive products, American industrialists began losing ground to the Japanese auto industry in the decades after World War II. David Halberstam, with his signature precision and absorbing narrative style, traces this power shift by delving into the boardrooms and onto the factory floors of the America’s Ford Motor Company and Japan’s Nissan. Different in every way—from their reactions to labor problems to their philosophies and leadership styles—the two companies stand as singular testaments to the challenges brought by the rise of the global economy. From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fifties and The Coldest Winter, and filled with intriguing vignettes about Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, and other visionary industrial leaders, The Reckoning remains a powerful and enlightening story about manufacturing in the modern age, and how America fell woefully behind. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fifties: An “intimate and monumental” account of the people at the core of the civil rights movement (Publishers Weekly). The young men and women at the heart of David Halberstam’s brilliant and poignant The Children came together through Reverend James Lawson’s workshops on nonviolence. Idealistic and determined, they showed unwavering bravery during the sit-ins at the Nashville lunch counters and on the Freedom Rides across the South—all chronicled here with Halberstam’s characteristic clarity and insight. The Children exhibits the incredible strength of generations of black Americans, who sacrificed greatly to improve the world for their children. Following Diane Nash, John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, and Rodney Powell, among others, The Children is rooted in Halberstam’s coverage of the civil rights movement for Nashville’s Tennessean. A New York Times Notable Book, this volume garnered extraordinary acclaim for David Halberstam, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Best and the Brightest. Upon its publication, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it “utterly absorbing . . . The civil rights movement already has produced superb works of history, books such as David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross and Taylor Branch’s recently published Pillar of Fire. . . . Halberstam adds another with The Children.” This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

The “compelling” New York Times bestseller by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, capturing the 1964 World Series between the Yankees and Cardinals (Newsweek). David Halberstam, an avid sports writer with an investigative reporter’s tenacity, superbly details the end of the fifteen-year reign of the New York Yankees in October 1964. That October found the Yankees going head-to-head with the St. Louis Cardinals for the World Series pennant. Expertly weaving the narrative threads of both teams’ seasons, Halberstam brings the major personalities on the field—from switch-hitter Mickey Mantle to pitcher Bob Gibson—to life. Using the teams’ subcultures, Halberstam also analyzes the cultural shifts of the sixties. The result is a unique blend of sports writing and cultural history as engrossing as it is insightful. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

In “one of the best books ever written about a sport,” Halberstam chronicles the story of four amateur US rowers and their 1984 Olympic dream (Newsweek). In 1984, rowing was a sport continually relegated to the margins, far from the spotlights attracted by other Olympic events. That year, four men went head-to-head for the right to compete for gold as the United States’ single sculler, an honor that would lead not to lucrative endorsement deals, but to the fleeting glory of the Olympic Games, and the satisfaction of ranking supreme among their competitive community of oarsmen. In pursuit of that goal, the rowers pushed through crippling pain, delaying personal relationships and careers, all for the rush of winning. Determined to understand these athletes of a seemingly bygone era, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author David Halberstam chronicles their bravery and obsession, delivering a dramatic human story, buzzing with adrenaline, about the lengths to which athletes will go to prove their mettle and compete on the highest level. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

More than 6 years after his death David Halberstam remains one of this country''s most respected journalists and revered authorities on American life and history in the years since WWII. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his ground-breaking reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote more than 20 books, almost all of them bestsellers. His work has stood the test of time and has become the standard by which all journalists measure themselves. The New York Times bestseller, now with a new introduction! The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979-80) in the life of the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions. The tactile authenticity of Halberstam''s knowledge of the basketball world is unrivaled. Yet he is writing here about far more than just basketball. This is a story about a place in our society where power, money, and talent collide and sometimes corrupt, a place where both national obsessions and naked greed are exposed. It''s about the influence of big media, the fans and the hype they subsist on, the clash of ethics, the terrible physical demands of modern sports (from drugs to body size), the unreal salaries, the conflicts of race and class, and the consequences of sport converted into mass entertainment and athletes transformed into superstars--all presented in a way that puts the reader in the room and on the court, and The Breaks of the Game in a league of its own.

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam''s bestseller takes you inside the football genius of Bill Belichick for an insightful profile in leadership. Bill Belichick''s thirty-one years in the NFL have been marked by amazing success--most recently with the New England Patriots. In this groundbreaking book, David Halberstam explores the nuances of both the game and the man behind it. He uncovers what makes Bill Belichick tick both on and off the field.

Pulitzer-prize winning author David Halberstam''s eyewitness account provides a riveting narrative of how the United States created a major foreign policy disaster for itself in a faraway land it knew little about. In the introduction to this edition, historian Daniel J. Singal supplies crucial background information that was unavailable in the mid-1960s when the book was written. With its numerous firsthand recollections of life in the war zone, The Making of a Quagmire penetrates to the essence of what went wrong in Vietnam. Although its focus is the Kennedy era, its analysis of the blunders and misconceptions of American military and political leaders holds true for the entire war.

"In a grand gesture of reclamation and remembrance, Mr. Halberstam has brought the war back home."---The New York Times David Halberstam''s magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book about the Vietnam conflict. More than three decades later, Halberstam used his unrivaled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another pivotal moment in our history: the Korean War. Halberstam considered The Coldest Winter his most accomplished work, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America''s postwar foreign policy. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu River and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures--Eisenhower, Truman, Acheson, Kim, and Mao, and Generals MacArthur, Almond, and Ridgway. At the same time, Halberstam provides us with his trademark highly evocative narrative journalism, chronicling the crucial battles with reportage of the highest order. As ever, Halberstam was concerned with the extraordinary courage and resolve of people asked to bear an extraordinary burden. The Coldest Winter is contemporary history in its most literary and luminescent form, providing crucial perspective on every war America has been involved in since. It is a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to complete. It stands as a lasting testament to one of the greatest journalists and historians of our time, and to the fighting men whose heroism it chronicles.

One of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century, Ho Chi Minh was founder of the Indochina Communist Party and its successor, the Viet-Minh, and was president from 1945 to 1969 of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). In exploring the life and career of Ho Chi Minh, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam provides a window into traditions and culture that influenced the American war in Vietnam, while highlighting the importance of nationalism in determining the war''s outcome. As depicted by Halberstam, Ho is first and foremost a nationalist and a patriot. He was also, according to the author, a pragmatist "who was able to turn the abstract into the practical and to embody the concept of revolution to his own people." This edition includes a new preface by the author.

Essays by historians, commentators, and writers--including Stan Katz, Sam Roberts, Anna Quindlen--in a celebration of America that combines more than 300 exquisite photos and illustrations with unsurpassed prose.

"In early October 2001, Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky begin a 1,300-mile trip by car to visit their beloved teammate Ted Williams, knowing that he is dying. Bobby Doerr, the fourth member of this close group - "my guys," Williams used to call them - is unable to be with them because he is back in Oregon tending to his wife of sixty-three years, Monica, who has suffered her second stroke." "At the core of the book is the friendship of these four very different but extraordinary men, the key players in a remarkable Boston Red Sox team, who stayed close to each other for more than sixty years." "The Teammates is the story of two trips: the final one that DiMaggio and Pesky are taking to see Williams, and another, a flight back in time, as they and Bobby Doerr recall the wonders of their years together and reminisce about a magical era."--BOOK JACKET.

David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain. "A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—The New York Times Using portraits of America’ s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’ s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic. Praise for The Best and the Brightest “The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”—The Boston Globe “Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.”—Los Angeles Times “A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.”—The Washington Post Book World “Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.”—Newsweek “A story every American should read.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist offers an intimate portrait of Engine 40, Ladder 35 on the Upper West Side of New York City, which lost 12 men in the World Trade Center attack.

"Halberstam evokes the internecine conflicts, the untrammeled egos, and the struggles for dominance among the key figures in the White House, the State Department, and the military.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian selects the 50 best pieces of sports writing of the century, capturing the great moments in baseball, boxing, horse racing, golf, and tennis.

Opposition is designed for you to reach your potential. This book will challenge you to face your trials head on and provide insight as to why enemies are need in your life.

He invented modern mass production. He gave the world the first people''s car, and his countrymen loved him for it. But at the moment of his greatest triumph, he turned on the empire he had built - and on the son who would inherit it.

Material pertaining to a special issue of Esquire in 1983 celebrating the magazine''s fiftieth anniversary, for which the editors commissioned fifty essays by leading American authors on "The Fifty Who Made a Difference," notable Americans active in the years since Esquire''s founding in 1933. Notes, correspondence, and drafts of essays from 21 of the fifty authors (or their representatives), in communication with Lee Eisenberg and Rust Hills (Esquire literary editor). Some miscellaneous material related to other issues, particularly from Truman Capote and Irwin Shaw, dates from as early as 1976 and as late as 1984.