David Halberstam's The Fifties

I am really enjoying this book.

Halberstam spoke at Tucker's undergrad graduation ceremony. His speech was probably the best commencement speech I've heard -- the focus was on finding a career that matched your true interests and loves, but he managed to give it without falling back on the standard clichés and bromides.

Halberstam divides the book into chapters which tend to have, as their focus, an individual or group of individuals whose story he puts into the larger context of the time.

He does a great job of mixing angles/changing the focus:

• Political history (learned all about Adlai Stevenson, who stuck to his principles in losing the '52 election to Eisenhower ("If Eisenhower adapted somewhat uneasily to the new communications technology, Stevenson did not. He hated the idea of using advertising with the political process... 'This is the worst thing I've ever heard of - selling the presidency like cereal.'"))

• Foreign affairs (the Korean War, development of the fusion bomb)

• Economic/business developments (great stuff on the history of McDonald's; also the fascinating story of Kemmons Wilson, a Memphis homebuilder who started Holiday Inn, practically on a whim, when he realized the future of America lay on the road)

• Art (tells the story of A Streetcar Named Desire by examining the lives of Williams, Kazan, and Brando - fun story of Brando just blowing Williams away when he read for the part of Kowalski)

Today I read about Margaret Sanger, who dedicated her life to birth control (which she saw as essential to liberating women) and made her greatest mark on history when she put together the team that developed the birth control pill: Katharine McCormick (provided the money), Goody Pincus (the scientific/genetics leadership ("personal politics did not matter to him -- only science did"), and M.C. Chang (a Chinese researcher who put in the actual hours in the lab).

I like the way Halberstam focuses on teams of people // relationships. For simplicity's sake (in other words, to organize history in my head), I tend to subscribe to "great man / great woman" theories of history, but Halberstam's probably got it better by putting individuals in the context of the others with whom they worked.

92. Why are there more typos in The Fifties than in the average book? Is this a common feature of really thick books (more difficult to copy edit?)?

93. Did Halberstam achieve, before his death, the same level of popular acclaim as Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough? I don't think he did, but I actually like his style of writing better than theirs.

94. Is there a similarly comprehensive book about The Sixties and/or The Seventies? Which current historian is most likely to write those tomes?