Two posts in two days? That's much better than my usual post-every-six-weeks pattern. But I wanted to write a few words about David Halberstam.
If you didn't hear already, David Halberstam died in a car accident early this morning in San Francisco. For those unfamiliar with him, he was a history/sports writer, and he was one of my favorite authors. Patriots fans are probably most familiar with his recent book about Bill Belichick, The Education of a Coach, but he wrote a bunch of sports books before that, including Breaks of the Game, The Teammates, October 1964, The Amateurs, and my personal favorite, Summer of '49, which chronicled the Red Sox and Yankees battling to the last game of the season for the A.L. pennant in 1949.
They're all great reads, and I'd recommend them to anybody. Halberstam was not just a sportswriter, though. He wrote about the Vietnam War in The Making of a Quagmire and The Best and the Brightest. He covered the 1950s in, um, The Fifties. And in The Powers That Be, he took a look at the corrupting influences of power and money in the media.
In my junior year of college I wrote a paper on Halberstam for my Literary Journalism class. "David Halberstam: Anecdotal Sportswriter Extraordinaire" I called it, and it wasn't just a catchy title; it was also, I thought, a really good description for his style of writing. What do I mean by this? Why explain it again, I'll just copy and paste the opening paragraphs from that paper:
"When reading David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game one gets the feeling that the author is a seemingly ubiquitous presence within the lives of the men who make up the 1979 Portland Trail Blazers. Halberstam takes the reader to places that are generally off-limits to the basketball fan. The reader is in the locker room with a non-responsive head coach Jack Ramsay, devastated after a particularly painful loss. He is in the trainer’s room with Larry Steele, who anxiously wonders if his knees will ever be well enough to play again. The reader sits in at lunch with the coaches while they discuss whom to cut and whom to sign. He even goes back a few years to Kermit Washington’s days as a gangly, unskilled high school basketball player.
"Halberstam, of course, is not ubiquitous, though he is a fine storyteller. In fact, Halberstam’s writings can be considered a collection of carefully constructed anecdotes, whereby he gathers information from various sources and, rather than quote these sources verbatim, he writes a story in his own words that, in most cases, is interesting and informative."
Well, I don't know, maybe that doesn't completely convey my point, but if you want to read the rest, let me know and I'll send you the next 11 pages. I know I don't post often here (and maybe that'll change), but I wanted to post a few words on Halberstam's work, and maybe, just maybe, that would encourage you to pick up one of his books. You won't regret it.
