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The Halberstam Tribute Tour

Filed under: The Squib Report Tagged: Alex Kotlowitz, books, Cynthia Gorney, David Halberstam, events, Frances FitzGerald, Gay Talese, in memoriam, Joan Didion, Neil Sheehan

Martin Schneider writes:

David Halberstam was probably the first serious American nonfiction writer I read, so news of his sudden death in April came as quite a shock to me.

I didn't become a serious reader until college, but I read Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game and The Powers That Be as a teenager, and both books had a profound effect on me. I don't think I've ever read a better nonfiction book about professional sports—a subject I cared a lot about at the time—than The Breaks of the Game. The Powers That Be seemed likewise world-changingly important. There are many situations and stories from those books I can still summon at will.

I wasn't certain whether Halberstam had been published in The New Yorker, but in fact, he was: the archive contains two items by him in the 1990s, one on Michael Jordan and one on Robert McNamara. I don't know about Jordan, but there probably wasn't a more qualified person in the world to discuss McNamara.

For all of these reasons, I was glad to see that a group of esteemed writers has volunteered to promote Halberstam's posthumously published book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War for Hyperion. The group includes Frances FitzGerald, Alex Kotlowitz, Cynthia Gorney, Neil Sheehan, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese, and the tour kicks off with seven events across the country on a single day. Here's the schedule:

Halberstam Tribute Tour

9/25/2007
Adam Hochschild and Geoffrey Wolff
Portland, ME

Dexter Filkins, Frances Fitzgerald, Leslie Gelb, Lt. Gen.
(Ret) Harold G. Moore, Don Oberdorfer, and William Stueck.
New York, NY

Cynthia Gorney
San Francisco, CA

Anna Quindlen
Milwaukee, WI

Alex Kotlowitz
Chicago, IL

Bill Walton
San Diego, CA

Ward Just
Martha's Vineyard, MA

9/26/2007
Neil Sheehan and Jim Wooten
Washington, DC

9/27/2007
Paul Hendrickson
Philadelphia, PA

9/30/2007
Nathaniel Philbrick
Nantucket, MA

10/3/2007
John Seigenthaler and John M. Seigenthaler
Nashville, TN

10/4/2007
Samantha Power
Boston, MA

10/15/2007
Joan Didion, Robert McNeil, Jon Meacham, and Gay Talese
New York, NY

More details at Hyperion and at the Emdashes Google Calendar.

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Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

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They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.

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