Selected Product:
| The Fifties
Paperback
Author: David Halberstam
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: 1994-05-10
ISBN-10: 0449909336
ISBN-13: 9780449909331
List Price: $17.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Sloppily written and tendentious page-turner...
| Customer Rating:  | 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. |
Can't be trusted
| Customer Rating: | I picked this book up, and read the first few pages, getting to the point where Halberstam mentions the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss. Now, as Herbert L. Packer once wrote in Ex-Communist Witnesses:Four Studies in Fact Finding, the trial proved Hiss's guilt as thoroughly as a legal proceeding can prove anything. And Allen Weinstein, in Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, found even more evidence of Hiss's guilt. For a historian to pretend, as Halberstam does, that there's some doubt about Hiss's guilt, and not give evidence, tells me that he's writing propoganda rather than history. When he adds in gratuitous gay-bashing (Whittaker Chambers was bisexual. What's that got to do with Hiss's guilt or innocence?), I drop the book in disgust. Your mileage may vary.
So read this book if you want, but remember the author is a liar, and don't use it as a reliable source. Check other sources about anything he says, including "The sky is blue," because he isn't honest. |
An Encyclopedic Look at the Fifties
| Customer Rating: | Have you always thought that the Fifties were merely a quiescent interlude between World War II and the Sixties? Think again. In this sweeping look at the decade, David Halberstam examines the trends and events that made the Fifties a very interesting and eventful time.
The book opens with a look at what was going on in the country in the late Forties, in the years just after World War II. The late Franklin D. Roosevelt still cast a long shadow over America and its politics, and this enabled Harry Truman to win election in his own right in 1948 and left the Republicans wondering if they would ever regain the White House. There was also apprehension about Communist moles in the government. On the world stage, the Cold War was deepening: Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, the Soviets got their first atomic bomb in 1949, and that same year China fell to the Communists.
This tense world situation made Truman determined to stop the advance of Communism by intervening in Korea. The U.S. fought the Korean War for three years to a stalemate, and Eisenhower managed to obtain an armistice six months after he became the first Republican president in 20 years.
Halberstam takes a thorough look at many of the developments (and their consequences) of the nascent suburban and mass culture: greater reliance on automobiles, Levittowns, increasing affluence, conformity and individuality, television, restaurants such as McDonald's, motels such as Holiday Inn, the decline of thrift (and increased purchasing on credit), the greater importance of sports in society, rock and roll music, and the birth control pill.
Civil rights was a recurring theme during the decade, especially after 1954. Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court, Emmett Till was murdered, Rosa Parks made her stand, Martin Luther King became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, and Central High School in Little Rock was integrated.
The Cold War became even more tense at the end of the Fifties, with the launch of Sputnik and the space race that followed it, the establishing of a Communist beachhead in Cuba, and the capture of a U.S. pilot who was flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union.
Yes, as other reviews have noted, the book is written from a liberal perspective, but if you can filter out the bias, there is much to be learned from this comprehensive look at a decade that gave us much of what we take for granted today. |
The Fifties, audio book
| Customer Rating: | | The audio was presented with the ad specifying it was practically new, and only two tapes had been used. Well, the tapes were not rewound, and one tape was totally useless. I called my credit card company and also the sender. She gave me credit for the book and the shipping, however I needed the book for a course required essay. The sender had not checked out the book to make sure it was usable, and took the word of a friend. Bad business. She said she was going to send me a book along with the credit, I have not received anything as yet. Marlene Palmer |
Were the fifties this boring in real life?
| Customer Rating: | | Ugh! Well-researched, but ultimately poorly written historical account. In fact, this is one of the most overrated historical works I've ever encountered; there is nothing readable or memorable about the sluggish prose, which trails on for 700+ agonizing pages. On the bright side, now that I've read this "seminal" account, I never have to read it again. |
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