Works by
David Halberstam
(Writer)
[1934 - April 23, 2007]

• The Noblest Roman (1961)

• The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (1968)

• The Making of A Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (1965)
  Halberstam's Pultizer-Prize-winning eyewitness account of the most critical political period of American involvement in Vietnam is now designed for classroom use by Daniel J. Singal. Including a new introduction and footnotes describing unfamiliar people and events, this work is lively and accessible for students. With new maps and photographs, students can visualize the crucial political events and increase their understanding of the policy errors of the early 1960s. The Making of a Quagmire captures the story of the Diem/Kennedy era, and the fundamental misconceptions that governed American policy and the South Vietnamese perspective.

• One Very Hot Day (1967)

• Ho (1971)
  Offering a rare Vietnamese perspective, this brief biography focuses on Ho's political development and the power of his personality in enlisting the support of his countrymen.

• The Best and the Brightest (1972)
  The Vietnam War has seemed more shadowy and cinematic to me than anything else for most of my life. I was born during the Watergate Hearings. My generation was touched by the war in Vietnam, but only in the sense that our parents were part of it--whether they marched for peace or served in the military or fell somewhere in between. But unlike the Baby Boomers, we are not defined by the war--it, literally and figuratively, did not make us. So, as a consequence, when I think of the Vietnam War it is the images that the generations before me created that come to mind--Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon...
  
  When I read The Best and the Brightest, that all changed. For the first time, I understood. No matter what your position may have been or may be, this book fully and expertly explores the American foreign policy decisions and actions that led to this war and its execution and paints a clear picture of its catalytic role in the shaping of today's America.
  
      -- Kelly Lamb, Marketing Coordinator (Ballantine Books)

• The Powers That Be (1979)

• The Breaks of the Game (1981)
  David Halberstam, best-selling author of THE FIFTIES and THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, turns his keen reporter's eye on the sport of basketball -- the players and the coaches, the long road trips, what happens on court, in front of television cameras, and off-court, where no eyes have followed -- until now.

• The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal
  (1985)
  In The Amateurs, David Halberstam once again displays the unique brand of reportage, both penetrating and supple, that distinguished his bestselling The Best and the Brightest and October 1964. This time he has taken for his subject the dramatic and special world of amateur rowing. While other athletes are earning fortunes in salaries and-or endorsements, the oarsmen gain fame only with each other and strive without any hope of financial reward.
  
  What drives these men to endure a physical pain known to no other sport? Who are they? Where do they come from? How do they regard themselves and their competitors? What have they sacrificed, and what inner demons have they appeased? In answering these questions, David Halberstam takes as his focus the 1984 single sculls trials in Princeton. The man who wins will gain the right to represent the United States in the 84 Olympiad; the losers will then have to struggle further to gain a place in the two- or four-man boats. And even if they succeed, they will have to live with the bitter knowledge that they were not the best, only close to it.

• The Reckoning (1986)

• Summer of '49 (1989)
  The year was 1949, and a war-weary nation turned from the battlefields to the ball fields in search of new heroes. It was a summer that marked the beginning of a sports rivalry unequaled in the annals of athletic competition. The awesome New York Yankees and the indomitable Boston Red Sox were fighting for supremacy of baseball's American League, and an aging Joe DiMaggio and a brash, headstrong hitting phenomenon named Ted Williams led their respective teams in a classic pennant duel of almost mythic proportions—one that would be decided in an explosive head-to-head confrontation on the last day of the season.

• The Next Century (1991)

• The Fifties (1993)
  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.

• October 1964 (1994)
  "October 1964 should be a hit with old-time baseball fans, who'll relish the opportunity to relive that year's to-die-for World Series, when the dynastic but aging New York Yankees squared off against the upstart St. Louis Cardinals. It should be a hit with younger students of the game, who'll eat up the vivid portrayals of legends like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris of the Yankees and Bob Gibson and Lou Brock of the Cardinals. Most of all, however, David Halberstam's new book should be a hit with anyone interested in understanding the important interplay between sports and society."
       --The Boston Globe

• The Children (1999)
  A remarkable true story of heroism, courage, and faith.

• Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (1999)
  From The Breaks of the Game to Summer of '49, David Halberstam has brought the perspective of a great historian, the inside knowledge of a dogged sportswriter, and the love of a fan to bear on some of the most mythic players and teams in the annals of American sport. With Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls he has given himself his greatest challenge and produced his greatest triumph.
  
  In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the book chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

• War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (2001)
  Halberstam's most important book, more ambitious and revealing than The Best and the Brightest, in what it tells of politics and decision making in America during the nineties. Just as Vietnam was the test case for our elders, the Balkans and other tragic conflicts became the proving ground for the Bush and Clinton administrations. What Halberstam has written is nothing less than a War and Peace for our generation.

• Firehouse (2002)
  Firehouse is a book that will move readers as few others have in our time. Through the kind of intimate portraits that are Halberstam's trademark, we watch a typical day in a firehouse unfold-the men called to duty, while their families wait anxiously for news of them. In addition, we come to understand the culture of the firehouse itself; why gifted men do this and why in so many instances they are eager to follow in their father's footsteps and serve in so dangerous a profession-why, more than anything else, it is not just a job, but a calling as well. This is journalism-as-history at its best, the story of what happens when one small institution gets caught in an apocalyptic day.

• The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship (2003)
  The Teammates is the profoundly moving story of four great baseball players who have made the passage from sports icons-when they were young and seemingly indestructible-to men dealing with the vulnerabilities of growing older. At the core of the book is the friendship of these four very different men-Boston Red Sox teammates Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Ted Williams-who remained close for more than sixty years. The book starts out in early October 2001, when Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky begin a 1,300-mile trip by car to visit their beloved friend Ted Williams, whom they know is dying. Bobby Doerr, the fourth member of this close group-'my guys,' Williams used to call them-is unable to join them. Doerr is back in Oregon tending to his wife of sixty-three years, who has suffered a second stroke. Acclaimed author David Halberstam has given us a book-filled with historical details and first-hand accounts-about baseball and about something more, the richness of friendship.

• The Education of a Coach (2005)
  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 new 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.

• The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (2007 release)

See also:

• The Best American Sports Writing of the Century  (1999, David Halberstam, ed. and Glenn Stout, series ed.
  Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Halberstam selects the fifty best pieces of sports writing of this century. The Best American Sports Writing of the Century showcases the best sports journalists of the twentieth century, from Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, William Mack, Gary Smith, and Frank Deford to A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, and includes such classics as "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" by Richard Ben Cramer, "Louis Knocks Out Schmeling" by Bob Considine, and "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete" by W. C. Heinz. This outstanding collection captures not only the century's greatest moments in baseball, boxing, horseracing, golf, and tennis, but some of the finest writing of our time. Guest editor David Halberstam is the author of The Reckoning, The Summer of Forty-Nine, The Breaks of the Game, and, most recently, The Children. Series editor Glenn Stout has written biographies of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson.

• New York September 11 (2001), David Halberstam (Introduction, Photographer)
  By now, the story of September 11 has been burned into our collective memory, but few have seen New York from the perspective of Magnum photographers. Eleven members of the legendary photo agency immediately dispersed from their monthly meeting in New York as the events unfolded, risking their own lives to document the incomprehensible. Their photographs, by turns haunting, surreal, and breathtaking, are collected together in New York September 11, by Magnum Photographers, compellingly presented in a high-quality edition from powerHouse Books. From their various vantage points we are transported to Ground Zero to witness the destruction of the World Trade Center, the buildings’ implosion which sent thousands fleeing from debris through the streets, and the exodus out, only to return to the scene in quiet observation and admiration of the rescue workers whose jobs have only begun and of the mourners who have been gathering in bewildering grief.
  
  As a tribute to the World Trade Center’s noted place in history, New York September 11, by Magnum Photographers will also include some of the most beloved photographs of the Twin Towers taken by Magnum over the last quarter of a century.

  A portion of the proceeds will be donated to an accredited charitable organization

• West Point: Two Centuries of Honor and Tradition (2002)
  West Point details the proud, 200-year history of the United States Military Academy at West Point through a collection of ritings and stunning photographs from Americas most preeminent historians and writers.Published in conjunction with the Academys bicentennial, this handsome volume commemorates the first two cen uries in the life of an institution that has become the model for military schools around the world. Since the Academys founding in 1802, West Point graduates have been high-ranking officers and leaders in every war in which America has fought. This institutions distinguished alumni include Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, William Sherman, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton, Jr., Dwight Eisenhower, Frank Borman, Edwin E. Buzz Aldrin, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and AOL founder James Kimsey.