One of the things I have enjoyed most over the past three decades has been the work of author David Halberstam, who died earlier this week in an automobile accident in California.
The first book Of his I came across was The Powers That Be, his examination of the modern media, with a particular emphasis on CBS, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Time Magazine.
His The Best and the Brightest offered the definitive look of how the U. S. became mired in Vietnam.
But Halberstam's works was not limited to typical, serious non-fiction topics. He also wrote some of the best non-fiction sports books of the past several decades, including The Breaks of the Game, which examined an NBA season with the Portland Trail Blazers, Summer of 49, which detailed a pennant race between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, The Friends (I believe that was the title), which told of former Red Sox Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr taking a trip to Florida to see Ted Williams before he died, and the book I enjoyed most of all, October 1964, which told the story of how the St. Louis Cardinals came from six games out with 11 to go to win the National League championship, then beat the heavily-favored Yankees in seven games in the World Series.
As I read Halberstam's book, the memories of sitting by the radio and listening to Harry Caray and Jack Buck describe those games came back. Halberstam was also able to get into the psyche of the sports heroes I had as a child, with memorable tales of Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Tim McCarver, Bill White, Curt Flood, Mike Shannon, and other members of that Cardinal team, as well as Yankees Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford, among others.
I will miss seeing new Halberstam books arrive, but fortunately he left behind nearly two dozen books which will be read for generations to come.
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